Outed at work today

Kathy, a colleague of ours from Brisbane was in town today and we went for lunch as a group. We were meeting at the front door to work's building. I arrived there with Jan, the person at the next desk to me and went to go outside. Jan asked if I was going out for a smoke and I said "No", just going out.

After lunch when we came back three of us got into the lift and for some reason Jan asked why I hadn't had a smoke. Kathy piped up "He's given up smoking" which led to a funny exchange

Jan: Have you given up?
Me: Yes.
Jan: Why did you lie when I asked if you were having a cigarette before?
Me: I didn't lie. You asked if I was having one and I said "No". Then I didn't have one.
Jan: When did you give up?
Me: Two weeks ago. (OK, a slight exaggeration it won't be two weeks until late tomorrow night)
Jan: No, when did you give up?
Me: Two weeks ago.
((Awkward Silence))
Me: When did you last see me have a smoke?
Jan (To Kathy): How did you know he gave up?
Kathy: He doesn't smell of smoke any more.

OK, work guessed before Tessa. Always a possibility as there are 4 of them and only one of her, but I wasn't expecting someone I only see every few months to be the one to work it out. I've asked the people in the lift not to mention it to the others. I do feel sorry for Tessa. I was hoping for a day or two pressure free, tops. Now it's gone on for nearly two weeks and I'm quite worried that she'll feel hurt when she discovers I didn't share for so long.

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Thursday 18 September 2014.

Pride cometh before a fall

I thought I was doing so well for the last few days until lunch today. We had an irregular get together at Sal's Pizza for people I used to work with.

Sitting outside after finishing eating I suddenly desperately wanted a smoke. I have no idea where it came from or why it was so strong.

If I'd had access to them at that point I would have lit up. I did resist walking up the road and buying some, but only just. I was already on my feet when the party broke up.

Right now I feel one hell of a lot less cocky than I have recently.

"Pride costs more than hunger, thirst and cold." - Thomas Jefferson

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Wednesday 17 September 2014.

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Nicknames for Nick O'Teene

Many call it "Nicodemon". As smoking is like a kiss, I've been calling her Lady N. While I wouldn't knowingly kiss a demon, I've kissed a few ladies in my time. I found out this morning it upsets someone who's on-line here as it's close to her nickname.

Sorry if the Lady N makes anyone uncomfortable. Any pet name runs the risk of upsetting someone. I used to work with a French guy called Nico and I guess he could feel the same about "Nicodemon".

So everyone, what do you call Nicotine?

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Wednesday 17 September 2014.

Approaching normality, day 10 non-smoking

"Probability factor of one to one. We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem." Trillian (hhgttg)

I feel I'm approaching normality, not there yet, but at least the buildings aren't washing up and down on the beach while the sea stays as stationary as a rock.

Today I had the least cravings I've had since giving up.

No desire to light up early this morning. No desire on arriving at work. I was polite to the jaywalker merely pointing out that had I had a car and not a bicycle that she would have been very sore indeed.

One of the other tenants in our office building is in a similar field and smokes. Sometime I used to smoke and chat with him. Today as I went to lunch he was having a smoke and I stopped and had a chat ... have to admit that I would have liked a cigarette at that point, but it's one of only two times today I have. The other was on returning from lunch.

Bugger! The third was while I was typing the previous paragraph :) I guess I'm just an illusion in the mind of Heisenberg.

I wouldn't call them cravings, just an "I'd like a cigarette" moment. Manageable and avoidable.

I've had a few stomach cramps late today. not sure where that's going, it's probably just the massive influx of almonds, cashews, chilli peas, etc.

PS Kudos to @aimee7 for her post about feeling normal this morning; 2 days ahead of me :)


An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Sunday 14 September 2014.

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William Blake Revisited

The Sick Rose

"O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:

"Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy."

Nothing, as such, to do with smoking but somehow it seems to fit as our love for smoking kills us.

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Sunday 14 September 2014.

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Stats Update: 10 days smoke-free

There are many other stats on these blogs, they all look similar, but these are mine, Mine, MINE!!! Take that Mr Stuyvesant.

Smoke free days: 10 days
Cigarettes NOT smoked: 300
Total savings: $269.00

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Tuesday 16 September 2014.

I have no words and I must scream.

I may have made a tactical mistake when I decided I wasn't going to tell anyone I'd given up, just wait for them to notice. I didn't tell them because I didn't need any extra pressure. Past experience taught me that I needed to be single minded ad any pressure pro or con needed to be avoided. To be fair to Tessa and my cow-irkers, none of them have ever complained about my smoking. Tessa would probably be very supportive as she was when her mother gave up. I had no plans of keeping it a "secret" for this long from Tessa. My thought process was that I wouldn't mention it to start to reduce pressures and then sometime during the first day or two it would come up in conversation. I'm actually stunned that it hasn't been noticed.

Tessa I went to Circus Circus for coffee and the ground floor was full up inside so we decided to sit at one of the outside tables. The people at the other outside table pointed out that they were smoking and I assured them that we didn't mind.

Tessa looked up from her smartphone and volunteered that I was a smoker myself. I strongly wanted to ask her when she'd last seen me with a cigarette, hadn't she noticed that this was my 9th day smoke-free? I didn't, I'm waiting for that look of realisation when she works it out for herself.

We ended up having quite a good chat with the people at the next table. Much to my surprise their smoke affected me little ... neither to the positive nor the negative. It's possible that I wasn't completely OK about it but I was OK enough that I could sit there and talk to them without giving way to my compulsions.

I'm thinking she hasn't noticed because it's not about a TV cooking contest and I don't use Fail book. She even asked if I needed a cigarette as we were going into lunch (Before going for coffee). I'm sure she'll work it out eventually ... Heat death of the universe and all that.

I'm never going to be made to feel guilty for not noticing a haircut again.

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Sunday 14 September 2014.

Ex Smokers and Snacking

I'm not normally a chewing gum fan, and despite my efforts to switch to it I'm sure I'm going to balloon out before I finish this process.

I'm eating a large amount of almonds and chilli peas together with moderate amounts of cashew nuts and then there's the occasional chocolate biscuits straight from the freezer. None of these are new to me, but I've sure ramped up my consumption. Dark chocolate TimTams is one of the two types of chocolate biscuits I keep in the freezer (The other being Select brand Chocolate Mint Creams). Love them ice cold.

What's everyone else on Quit-line doing snackwise?

Once the weather clears up a little I think I'll ramp up the exercise. Even a bit more cycling would help.

I've walked two of the last three "Round the bays", maybe this time I'll be able to jog it.

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Saturday 13 September 2014.

Normal brain dysfunction restored

OK, not quite true.

I am having early migraine symptoms today. I get them from time-to-time so it's not unexpected I should get one during the quitting process. I've never been sure what triggers them, but I know stress can speed the process up.

Something is still playing havoc with my sleep processes. I went to bed 9:30 PM, slept to 1 AM, got back to sleep about 2:30, slept to about 7:30 didn't want to get up so I dozed off and on until a little before 10:30 AM. I don't feel quite as zapped as I have the last few days, but I also don't feel completely rested. I'm pinning it on the Champix, but it could be anything.

I'm definitely staying home today. Catch up on some of the comedy TV stuff I recorded during the week and wasn't in the mood to watch.

So far I haven't had any cravings today. It's only day 8 so I know it's just my brain being subtle while getting ready for a guerrilla attack on my common-sense. I'm hoping to defeat whatever is coming mostly by being in a place where it would be impossible to get a cigarette.

Take that you 1.5 kilos of ugly wrinkled grey matter :)

So far I'm not seeing the migraine as abnormal, just annoying. So far I've just had a few lots of "sparkles" so I know it's hovering in the background, I just wish it would hit and clear itself out my system for a month or two.

[[Updates 13 October

• The migraine hasn't really kicked in so it's now a month overdue. They'd been getting progressively more frequent and stronger for a few years so here's hoping.
• This tiredness hung around for over a month before mysteriously vanishing. Tessa's started a couple of days after me & ended about the same time. I have no proof what was behind it, but I suspect that Champix & quitting may have played their part in making it worse.]]

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Saturday 13 September 2014.

Vogonity: Resistance is futile. Day 7 non-smoking.

Somebody once said of me "doesn't suffer fools gladly, or at all if he can help it".

My vegan brother's in town from the UK at the moment. We wanted to meet for lunch. I suggested Newmarket where I work at noon. This was too early for him and too hard to get to. He wanted to go to Burger Fuel (I never knew they did vegan food) at 1. The nearest Burger Fuel's in Parnell so we compromised, Parnell 12:30.

12 sharp my phone rings. It's the brother. He's in Newmarket and doesn't know how to get to Parnell. I ask him where is. He can't give a clear explanation or street names and eventually advances he's outside a pub called The Lumsden.

"OK, wait there I'm 2 minutes walk away".

On one hand, he's lived overseas for 20 years, but he grew up in this town. We used to go swimming at the Newmarket pool. Which reminds me, he's training for a triathlon. He wanted to swim some laps. Standing outside the Newmarket pool he asks how to get to the tepid baths. I showed him the pool through the window.

Seven days of not smoking and Champix or not, my tolerance levels are down, after turning up where I suggested at the time I suggested both of which were impossible, I had little left.

We got down to Parnell and he had his vegan burger, while I had a Bastard burger with added Stilton (Blue cheese) sauce. What can I say? I would happily have gone to a vegetarian restaurant, but I'm not going into a burger place this week and not having my favourite from their menu.

I know that vegans won't eat honey; I took great delight teasing him that logically they also shouldn't eat fruits and vegetables pollinated by domesticated bees.

P.S. I know my brother isn't a fool. He did his doctorate in artificial intelligence; based on today it could have been a useful prosthetic for him.

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Friday 12 September 2014.

Champix side-effects?

I've been going to bed and sleep a couple of hours early all week, yet I feel really tired. I did have a couple of broken nights but most nights I've slept through.

I've searched for this symptom related to Champix, and the people I've found who report it are experiencing vivid dreams and/or insomnia which I am not getting.

Today's my seventh day off the cigarettes, so I'm sticking with the Champix no matter what, but I could do with a bit more energy.

Fatigue", "exhaustion", "washed out" ... definitely. I just hope I can manage with it.

"Dizzy" - possibly what I experienced as mild nausea my first few days on Champix. Largely passed now.

"Basically a zombie with the munchies for a good 3 months" - Yikes. I've got the munchies, I hope I can avoid the other part, but if you see me wandering around saying "Brains ... brains .... brains" run :).

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Friday 12 September 2014.

Day 6. Getting more normal

I had my first noticeable health / fitness benefit today. While I was cycling to work I realised that I had been working the gears so I was changing up earlier and changing down later; meaning I was putting more energy into the ride ... all this without noticing I was working harder.

Back at work today after yesterday's stress attack, things seemed a lot easier than they have been all week.

I decided to venture further afield at lunch time than early in the week and went down to Passion Food at the Newmarket Plaza food court for a crispy skin pork with chili. I won't say I have this a lot, but when I front up at this Chinese food stand and hand over $10, no words are required.

I'd been avoiding this food court as it's right next door to the tofu shop where I'd often bought cigarettes. I did look in the door of the tofu shop as I left, but I was thinking of buying some biscuits or sweets.

Mid afternoon I needed something: Some nameless, unspecified, nebulous, thing. I decided to head down to the local convenience store for a large V and a packet of sugar-free gum. I'm not normally a gum chewer, and with Champix, nicotine gum isn't a good idea, but I wanted to be doing something with my mouth that didn't involve calories.

Know what you mean. For me it's almonds and nuts .. I like the chewable vice.

Stick with the patches, they get you through breaking the smoking habit, then when you come off them you'll still get the nicotine withdrawal, but hopefully you will have broken the link from the nicotine to the smoking habit. ... At least that's the theory as someone once explained it to me.

When we know how easily we'd weaken and go back, it's best to deliver ourselves from evil and lead not into temptation

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Tuesday 11 September 2014.

Triggers Non smoking night 5

Tessa and I went out for a pizza at the Ponsonby International food court and then on to Circus Circus in Mt Eden for coffee. They are both regular haunts of ours and the first time we've been since I quit.

It was really quite weird as at several points on the trip I felt a strong desire to smoke. The desire was much stronger than the desires I've been having for the last couple of days. I thought about this and realised that these were at places where previously I would have lit-up. Getting out of the car, leaving the food court, etc.

I never realised that I was so predictable as to where I lit up while travelling around. I'm hoping that these were places where I nearly always lit up, as I've already worked out that the desire to smoke associated with a place seems to reduce much faster when I (nearly) always lit up there.

It felt good to be back at Circus Circus. I begged off with a weak excuse at the weekend as I did not wish to go anywhere I might feel strong temptation with a tobacco pusher nearby.


One lucky thing for me is that I haven't smoked inside for well over 10 years, so computer, TV, etc aren't associated with smoking (Except some ad breaks where I'd rush outside).

There's a guy I have worked with for 14 years who hasn't smoked since before I met him. To this day he often carries a pen outside and mock puffs on it when he needs a stress break. He refers to the smoking pen as a "kuglescriber".

I won't suggest putting anything in your mouth while doing "big toilet", but about 20 years ago when a club I belonged to banned smoking in the toilets, I remember this elderly lady saying "I can't understand how men can smoke in the toilet" ... to which I replied "It's a gender differences, when men urinate, our mouths aren't involved" and wandered off before she had a reply.

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Monday 10 September 2014.

Stress Leave, Non-smoking day 5

I didn't sleep well last night at least in part because I was still stewed up about my mother's comments on Sunday.

I also had two other extra stress creating things today, including a complaint I made to the building manager about rats in the ceiling, and how I think they are getting there (don't ask, she was horrified).

I think normally I would have soldiered on and gone to work but today I just couldn't cope. I phoned my boss, explained that for reasons I didn't want to give, but are unrelated to work, I was too stressed to work and asked for a day's annual leave at zero notice. Luckily he said "Yes" without argument.

I really hate to think how I would have got through the day if he'd said "No". I doubt I would have done any programming worth having.

I've spent most of the day writing a long letter to my mother about Sunday. Explaining how thrown I was by her dragging something up from 43 years ago and denying her allegations as to my responsibility (I don't think the facts themselves are greatly in dispute). I have no idea if I'll send it, but I think writing it helped me. It basically concluded "Yes I was nasty and cruel. I was a child, children often are nasty and cruel. In my child mind it wasn't even that, but of simple self defence. I was taking the only steps my child mind could think of to try and protect myself from your abdication of your responsibility as my parent to protect me and my brothers. Until Sunday I assumed that I had long since moved on. Your bringing it up brought back that feeling of betrayal you engendered in me. I can understand the guilt you must feel, and can see how you might wish to avoid it, but you must accept it if you are to be at peace with yourself."

I had mild desires for a cigarette early afternoon and then slightly stronger about ½ an hour ago (Which is why I'm writing this blog, now ... displacement). Despite the extra stress I didn't have as strong a desire as yesterday.

I did go out to my smoking spot on the back porch a couple of times. Not to smoke, just to stand and think.

Let's hope I sleep well tonight.


An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Wednesday 10 September 2014.

Cravings Tuesday, Day 4

Cravings were less today, but still bad at times.

I'm still being very careful to avoid tobacco pushers. I feel less tempted to buy a packet, but it is definitely still quite strongly there, so avoiding their shops is a help.

About 11:30 AM I started to get strong cravings. By about 11:50 I decided I needed to go and get some food as a distraction. On my way to lunch I noticed several women smoking in Newmarket's Olympic Memorial Park. Weirdly I didn't notice any men. Yesterday I noticed the man at the panel beaters having a quick cigarette. He wasn't there today.

Today for lunch I grabbed a burger and chips from the Newmarket branch of Eden Kebabs then ate them in the memorial park. While I was there I watched a woman from Maori TV interview a man whose jacket said he was from the Maori sports foundation; it kept me from ogling the female smokers (Focussing on their cigarettes).

Going home was much easier tonight. I didn't get the shakes and I didn't have a strong compulsion to stop at the petrol station for a packet. My munchies weren't as bad, but I still have snacked quite a bit.

I will admit that if there had been a packet here, I would have smoked one(*) so I still don't trust myself, but I know I can avoid buying any and I don't intend being with any smokers for quite some time. Ex smokers are like alcoholics one drink and they are back into it, just one puff and we are hooked again.

Weirdly enough, I have effectively given up drinking ... I might have a couple of glasses of wine every few months ... but wasn't hooked, so it was easy. Smoking though ... a whole different story.

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(*) "One, just one" ... how easy it is for us to lie to ourselves. Luckily I don't believe a word of it. That "Just one" is how I've gone back to smoking in the past. That plus how good that first cigarette feels. The trouble is it's a trap and this time I'm not falling into the trap.

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Tuesday 9 September 2014.

Goooooood Morning Smoke Freeeeeee!!!!!!!!

I slept well last night, As I thought, Sunday night was just an aberration.

The desires I have for cigarettes are even less than they were on previous mornings. I'm actually looking forward to work without the dread of cravings.

I actually woke up a couple of minutes before the alarm, but felt so cold I stayed in bed. Different to when I smoked as then I woke up, grabbed my jandals and dressing gown, and walked out to the back porch to light up.

Great, I can reward myself with sloth for giving up tobacco. LOL

A former girlfriend once said that I was amazing. I'd be snoring, give one snort, open my eyes, swing my legs out of bed and throw my dressing gown on as I walked out the door. I guess like cigarettes this is now a part of my past and not my present or future.

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Tuesday 9 September 2014.

Non-smoking day 3 Monday

I didn't sleep too well last night. I went to bed early and woke up a little before 2 AM with a full bladder. After dealing to that I couldn't settle and didn't get back to sleep until after 3:30 AM. I've heard this can be a side-effect of Champix, but think it was more stress related. Time will tell. When the alarm went I really wanted more sleep, but work summoned.

Before I started this programme I tried to work out where my big risks were. Work is one of the big ones. I knew I needed to give up late on Friday so I could have two full days smoke-free before next being at work. Even so, I have a fairly intense and mentally demanding job so I saw my first smoke-free working day as a huge risk.

It was weird. I seem to have already adjusted to not stepping outside for that first smoke of the day; but when I left home for the bike ride to work I instinctively patted my jacket pockets for my cigarettes. (Yes, I used to smoke while riding my push-bike. If you work in the Parnell, Newmarket ares you may have just sussed who I am).

Starting the work day without a quick puff just before going in wasn't too bad. I've deliberately decided not to tell anyone without a "need to know" about my giving up. My workmates don't need to know. If they notice they notice, but I'm not bringing the matter up. A couple of times during the day when I would have taken a quick smoke break wasn't too bad either. I just reminded myself I wasn't smoking. I actually went to my designated smoking area for a minute or so ... mainly to get out of the air conditioning and computer whirr.

Lunch time was tough. I went to a nearby lunch-bar for a sandwich and chips. I chose this lunch bar today because I knew that I wouldn't walk past a place that sells cigarettes. On the way back to work, eating lunch as I walked I started thinking about the closest places that sell cigarettes. I ended up deciding that the closest one required walking past work ... so as soon as I got to work I raced inside and started back into work a little earlier than scheduled.

If I can play mind games to try and trick myself into visiting tobacco pushers, I can certainly play mind games to stop myself.

This afternoon was also tough. Mostly because the work I was doing required only very small amounts of action by me and large amounts of waiting for the computer to install new software. Time I could spend thinking about you-know-what.

I was reasonably well in control, and didn't get back to mentally triangulating tobacco pushers.

Riding home was tough. Tough, tough, tough. I was physically shaking, almost begging myself to stop at the Mobil petrol station 500 metres from home and buy a packet. A little voice was saying "Just smoke one and throw the rest of the pack away". No, I was strong, I resisted.

Then I went to my local dairy for a loaf of bread. The lady there asked if I wanted any cigarettes. She's the first I've told I'm giving up, she wished me luck. I ended up buying a packet of chili peas, to give a lower calorie alternate to the sugar snacks and nuts.

For about the first hour I was munching and wanting that cigarette. It's abated now. I know I shouldn't let myself substitute junk-food for the cigarettes; but right now I'm adding "long term" to that.

It's 7PM and I'm feeling pretty good.

3 days clean!

 An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Monday 8 September 2014.

Non-smoking days 1 and 2

After smoking since 1976 I finally gave up on Saturday the 6th September 2014. Friday night was day 7 of my Champix and Saturday was going to be day 8 so I used up all my remaining cigarettes and went to bed in a cigarette free house.

I know it was a cigarette free house. I searched the place top-to-bottom to see if any cigarettes or tobacco would turn up. Nothing, nil, Nada. Sometimes I told myself I'd destroy any cigarettes I found, sometimes I was more honest and admitted to myself that this destruction would involve burning them, one-at-a-time.

Saturday was rough. Every time I walked by the back door I wanted to step out and light up (For over 10 years I've always smoked outside). I know if I'd had any I would have lit up. I refused to leave the house.

Several times I felt desperate for a smoke. I ended up hitting the sweets, biscuits, cashews, peanuts, and almonds pretty hard.

I also spent a few hours napping during the day.

Sunday was a little better still wanted a smoke but I felt that as long as I avoided any place I could buy tobacco I could make it. I was still getting the cravings a little (October note: How naive, they weren't little yet, just less than Saturday's).

I had to go other to my mother's as, after I decided my quit date, after I started taking Champix, Ross, my brother in the UK decided to make a flying visit. I needed to set up a room for him to stay in.

Weirdly enough my mother decided to tackle me about an old disagreement circa 1972. I was too stressed to be nice so I wasn't impressed.

Didn't sleep too well. Went to bed early and woke up a little before 2 AM. Couldn't settle and didn't get back to sleep until after 3AM Monday 8th. I've found that writing it up helped me tonight. Writing is cathartic or something ... not that I'm a Cathar ... LOL

An earlier version of this posting was originally published on Quit line on Monday 8 September 2014.

Determined to give up smoking

Like most smokers I've wanted to give up for quite some time. Since the late 1970s I've made innumerable attempts to give up. Usually I've lasted no more than a few hours, occasionally a few days.

I've tried nearly everything from cold turkey,  hypnosis, nicotine patches, nicotine gum, Zyban and Champix.

The longest I ever managed to give up was for about a week, about 11 years ago. That was with the aid of a medicine called Zyban. For reasons I don't know Zyban is now no longer recommended and Champix is the preferred alternative. I did try champix a few years back without great success, but this time I am pretty determined.

My memory was that with Champix you were supposed to give up about 2 weeks into the course and I've registered with Quit line with a smoking succession date of 13 August. I've had the prescription filled and discovered that I'm supposed to quit some time in the second week of taking Champix. I've now redefined my quit date in my head.

Champix starter tablets are about the size of a grain of uncooked long-grain rice and about as easy to swallow. A large glass of water and some food is required to get them down.


This entry is actually being written on October 10 2014, attempting to reconstruct in my mind how I felt in late August.

Smoking blogs redux

This entry is actually being written on October 11 2014. I've spent the last month giving up smoking.

As part of my therapy I've been blogging every night since the 3rd night on the Quit-line site.

Quit-line is censored and it's also not the worlds greatest site for anything that isn't totally focussed on the process of smoking cessation. As always with me nothing is ever totally focussed on one thing so I've decided I want to repatriate my writing to a site I control.

I'll be republishing (sometimes edited) versions of my Quit-line blogs on here. This raises an interesting question about dates.

For historicity I want the blog date to be the original publication date, but I don't want to just suddenly dump 45 posts into the history of this blog. So I've decided to initially post them in something approaching a compressed version of real-time (two or 3 a day) but with the original date on them until I'm up-to-date.

I'll start with a (reconstructed) day I started preparing to quit followed by the blogs.

At some future point I'll move this explanation to where it belongs towards the start of the chronology. I've moved it to the start.

How I follow webcomics

Recently The Frumps (NSFW), one of the webcomics I follow, asked how its readers used its RSS feed and if we preferred having a thumbnail or a full-sized cartoon. I started writing a reply to them then realised that I wasn't just explaining how I used their RSS feed, but how I follow websites in general.

I follow quite a few RSS feeds, originally I used Google Reader but when when that closed I decided that in future I would have control of my reading and not be placed at the mercy of a third party service that could vanish at any time. Eventually I decided to use a self hosted copy of Feed-on-Feeds as my RSS aggregator. I use it for following webcomics, news (e.g. newspaper sites), science blogs, some technology bloggers I enjoy, as well as social, political and environmental bloggers. Occasionally if RSS isn't an option I'll subscribe to email notifications for a really good blog, but never (so far) to a webcomic.

Did a 4 Dimensional black hole spawn the Universe?

Not being a physisist I've often idly wondered how the universe, constrained to a single point, at the start of the big bang avoided being a black hole, now there's a theory that it started as a 4 dimensional black hole, making it even more mysterious to me.

The "Big Bang model tells us that the Universe exploded out of an infinitely dense point, or singularity. But nobody knows what would have triggered this outburst: the known laws of physics cannot tell us what happened at that moment."

"It is also difficult to explain how a violent Big Bang would have left behind a Universe that has an almost completely uniform temperature, because there does not seem to have been enough time since the birth of the cosmos for it to have reached temperature equilibrium."

Nature

Qondio, R.I.P.

It looks like Qondio has finally shut down.

I was a user of it from the early days when it was known as Qassia. I think it started on a fairly optimistic note as a place where quality content could be posted, and quality was ensured by a process of having other members rate contributions. Unfortunately being open access they had a lot of problems when some scammers moved in and tried to rig the voting process. If I recall correctly this led to them making some changes but by then the damage to their reputation seems to have been done.

It limped along for a couple of years and I noticed a week or two back that it no longer seemed to be there. For a while the domain name redirected and now seems to be on a hosting provider's default page.

I liked the idea and for quite a while I hoped it would recover, but alas it seems not.

I'm now working on transferring the posting that were unique to Qondio to this blog (or in a few cases one of my other ones) and will be keeping the original posting dates.

Choosing Creative Commons Licenses

I've just changed the licence my blogs are published under.  Everything that's published in most of the world is automatically covered by copyright and by default the author has all rights to their words (or images) and also by default nobody else has the right to republish the work. Some people choose to allow others to republish their works with or without modifications and there are a number of licences that give these permissions, they are all based in and depend on copyright law.

If you are going to use a free licence you need to carefully choose one that allows your work to be used in the way that you are happy with while blocking uses you consider inappropriate. "Carefully" both to give effect to your wishes and because all the free licences I'm aware of are perpetual and once you've licenced someone to use your work they can continue using it under that licence for the life of the copyright.

MaKey MaKey Almost anything's a keyboard

Well, anything that's even a bit conductive that is.

This is a seriously cool gadget, Arduino based and developed at M.I.T., MaKey MaKey connects via USB to a computer and lets you build touch pads or keyboards out of bananas, modelling clay and even people. 

MaKey MaKey Mario
Flikr: CC-By-NC

Like the conductive "Squishy Circuits" from a couple of years back this looks like a great way to interest young minds in electronics.

More information and how to get one (US$ 45 including shipping) at their KickStarter page or read more at their own project page.They also have a Flikr set of their own projects.

At the time of writing there are more applications on the KickStarter page than the others but I guess that will change over time.

Kiwis cashing in on YouTube

Interesting

"More than 100 New Zealand "video bloggers" have so far joined YouTube's Partner Programme, which was first offered to producers of popular content and has been extended to everyone in the 20 countries where it's available."

NZ Herald News

"Big Music" may have put Kim Dotcom out of business for offering unsigned musicians a platform to promote their talents, but Google is a lot bigger and less touchable than he was. Are services like this the beginning of the end for "Big music" or will Google simply add "Big Content" to it's existing "Big Data" role? 

"The hand of Vengeance found the bed
To which the Purple Tyrant fled;
The iron hand crush'd the Tyrant's head
And became a Tyrant in his stead."

William Blake

E.R. Bumper Sticker

I feel this should be her bumper sticker, but then I would love to see a Rolls Royce with a bumper sticker saying "My other car's a Lada" so who am I to say?

The story behind the picture: A couple of weeks thought, an image originally from NASA (in the public domain), 2 minutes adding a caption and cropping with The Gimp.

Hope you enjoy it.

Affiliate Programmes Update

A little over four years back I was thinking about using affiliate links on my websites and discovered it wasn't very easy to find suitable affiliate programmes (affiliate programs?) for the New Zealand webmaster.

Being me, I decided to start an affiliate directory instead and list the ones I could find that were prepared to be open about their programmes and paid in NZ$ or at least in some form that was easy to cash over here. After a few months I had a second unhappy go at finding sites and reported my not very happy experiences on one of my other blogs ¿Que? - Biting The Hand:

"Over the last few days it feels like I've looked at close to 1,000 affiliate scheme sign-up pages, probably only half that in reality. From these I've extracted 50 that I've added to the directory and another 20 where I've queried the scheme owner"

Since then I've added very few new entries to the directory and  just purged ones where the site went away. The directory has been a bit of an open wound that I didn't want to touch.

Last night I decided it was past time to refresh the directory. I purged out all but one of the schemes that still hadn't replied to my 2008 query (I re-queried the other one) and went looking for more. Things have changed a lot in the last 42 months and I was pleasantly surprised. I just searched Google for "affiliate", New Zealand sites only and started following links. Out of the first 60 links I've added 19 sites. OK, 10 of those I queried for some information, but usually just 1 or 2 minor points. Of the others, some were programmes I already listed, some were blog entries about affiliate programs, some were duplicates (Google listing multiple pages from the same site on different pages), a couple were me and only a very few were genuinly bad ones.

One thing I've noticed is that there are programme owners who are now offering 20% or greater commission, in one case 75%. Four years ago commissions under 10% were pretty common. Today I found a program that actually apologised for offering only 10% and explained that it was because they used live sales people to close the deal and human trainers to deliver the product. They neededn't have worried yet, 10% is still pretty mainstream for high value sales.

OK, Webmasters are now much better at creating and explaining realistic programmes on their sites, but how responsive are they? One person I queried late last night responded first thing this morning, despite it being a Saturday. He gave me all the answers I requested. It will be interesting to see how long the others take.

Are things perfect? Not yet. The fact that I had to query basic facts about payment and cookie retention from half the programmes that I felt worth listing means that they still aren't thinking it through properly.

Finally, one local business is offering a massive 0% commission ... it really makes me feel like promoting their products.

Bulk Directory Submission Spam

Hardly a day goes by when I don't receive at least one spam offering to improve my search engine rankings or offering bulk directory submissions, often several. If you own a website with a contact page you probably get a few too. Here's why you should never give them your business.

Dumb Phishing Attempt

This was in my spam folder today, dummied up to look like it was from a major New Zealand bank

This wasn't pretending to be from my bank, but even if I did bank with the company that was being impersonated there is no way I would believe a message with such poor grammar would have been from them.

If, as we are constantly told, phishing is a profitable business, why can't they afford to have their pitches translated or at least proofread by someone who actually speaks English? I wonder if it is arrogance or stupidity?

Study shows just how complex cancer tumors can be

From "Not Exactly Rocket Science" by Ed Yong: "

Cancer isn’t a single disease, so we can dispense with the idea of a single “cure”. There are over 200 different types, each with their own individual quirks.

Even for a single type – say, breast cancer – there can be many different sub-types that demand different treatments. Even within a single subtype, one patient’s tumour can be very different from another’s. They could both have very different sets of mutated genes, which can affect their prognosis and which drugs they should take. Even in a single patient, a tumour can take on many guises. Cancer, after all, evolves. A tumour’s cells are not bound by the controls that keep the rest of our body in check. They grow and divide without restraint, picking up new genetic changes along the way. Just as animals and plants evolve new strategies to foil predators or produce more offspring, a tumour’s cells can evolve new ways of resisting drugs or growing even faster.

Now, we know that even a single tumour can be a hotbed of diversity."

Full article

Aussie Kids Believe Yoghurt Grows On Trees.

Australia once rode to prosperity on the sheep's back, but nowadays children are so divorced from rural life many believe yoghurt grows on trees and 40 per cent of the Year 10s believed cotton came from an animal. NZ Herald

NZ and Auckland Linux User Group mailing lists down

The list maintainer, Mark Foster, has reported that the virtual machine that normally runs AuckLUG and NZLUG mailing lists has suffered a misfortune.

As a temporary measure he has set up a new mailing list at http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/nzlug.

If you are a subscriber to either of these lists and Mark hasn't subscribed you to the temporary list you can subscribe there. Equally if you're interested in Linux and you'd like to subscribe, you'll be made most welcome.

Indian call for affirmative action on Free Software

Erosion of privacy and personal freedom on online media drew worried mention at the just-concluded Fourth International FOSS (free and open source software) Conference-Kerala (FOSSK4). [...]

It demanded affirmative action by Governments around the world - especially in the Global South - to promote the use of FOSS as a cost-effective, customisable and robust technology option.

The Hindu, Business Line

Linux package dependencies show predator/prey relationship

Computer people often talk about a "software ecosystem" on various computer platforms, but it's rare to see someone take the terminology seriously. Evolutionary biologists Miguel A. Fortuna, Juan A. Bonachela, and Simon A. Levin of Princeton University have used the tools of ecosystem analysis to look at the evolution of Debian releases, examining things like package dependencies and software incompatibility.

"Overall, the key feature of the modularity the team identified seems to be that the decreasing number of conflicts across modules means that more of the software available for the operating system can install, since it's rare that a conflict will completely block an entire module from installing and running. The authors suggest that we might learn something about biology by studying software, but they don't actually provide examples of how this might work; at this stage, then, it's not an especially compelling argument. "

Full Article at Ars Technica

Facebook engineer talks about how they made FB mobile run everwhere

Facebook has the most downloaded smartphone application ever and over 350 million users accessing their website from both smart and dumb phones.

This is a talk by Dave Fetterman of Facebook on how they evolved their smart phone interface from fairly thick client to a progressively thinner one with more Html 5 features in the mix.

How Facebook Mobile Was Designed to Write Once, Run Everywhere:

Zurker A New Social Network

Over recent days Zurker a new social network has gone into alpha test.

For the benefit of anyone who has been trapped in a windowless room for the last 7 years, social networking is a web phenomenon where individuals interact with other individuals through sharing information. Usually there is a way for businesses to spread their message as well.

Today the 800 kg gorilla of social networking is Facebook who took the mantle from Myspace and Bebo in 2008. They are being challenged by Google, but look to be weathering that storm. They are also challenged to an extent by special purpose social networks like linked-in for business connections.

Previous social networks have had privacy issues as people didn't really trust the corporations to whom they gave all that personal information. Zurker has turned that on its head by allocating a portion of their ownership to be owned by their members. Currently these are "Virtual shares" but they say that when they launch their corporation they will be turned into real shares.

Zurker is being rolled out on a country by country basis and today it's New Zealand's turn! A couple of days ago I was approached by one of the founders I've had previous dealings with and asked to help with the Kiwi operation, which I agreed to. Just after midnight I registered the .nz domain name zurker.co.nz and today it's live.

Technically it's invite only at the moment but they make it pretty clear that they welcome invites via blog posts, so here's yours ... Click here ... send me a "Convo" when you sign-up. Yes, like all the others, they have their own jargon, but it translates fairly easily to the terms you are used to.

As alpha quality software you can expect a few glitches, and so far I've found a couple of fairly minor ones, but the quality seems pretty good.

Disclaimer, I'm not an executive but subject to negotiations, I intend having a personal stake in Zurker.

13 Ways To Think About And Crush Your Competition

I've been thinking about Internet start-ups a bit recently and was impressed when I stumbled across this article
13 Ways To Think About And Crush Your Competition by Jason L. Baptiste who is the co-founder and CEO of a growing venture backed startup.

He's got thirteen points and they are all different, but if I had to produce a summary it would be under two headings:

• Be your own business - leave the competition to make their own mistakes and don't copy them.
• Make sure you have sufficient funding in place to survive.

There's a lot more and I have no qualms recommending reading and thinking about this article.

Clement Family Christmas

Today was Christmas day and as we have done for the last several years we gathered at my sister Diana's house for the day.

To save an early start, my mother went over the night before and stayed. Tessa, my wife, Tessa's mother and I arrived around 8:30 AM. Although she runs her own baking business these days, Tessa is a fully qualified and experienced professional chef and she she insists she prepares and cooks the turkey. She soon had it stuffed and in the oven.

Then it was outside to enjoy a breakfast of Diana's home made bagels on the porch. In New Zealand, December is summer and we are having one of the first really hot days of this year's summer. Sitting on the porch was great. It was a small gathering this year, just Diana, her two children, our mother, me, Tessa, Tessa's mum and our cousin's adult daughter.

After breakfast the children wanted to see their gifts (and I suspect some of the adults did too) so it was inside for the presents to be passed out. The kids loved their presents .. mostly games for their playstation and a couple of Harry Potter DVDs. The adults gifts were more mundane, but were appreciated, Tessa got given a couple of cookbooks (I think she has them all now) and a food dehydrator which she went into raptures about ... she's been dropping hints about wanting one for a few months.

I have two brothers, one in Sydney and the other in England. The both usually phone during the day, the one in England did, but got a really bad phone line so he's going to phone Mum tonight. No word from the one in Sydney, but he'll probably phone in the evening.

Then on to the Christmas dinner. Traditional roast turkey with potato, kumera (a local sweet potato), onion, broccoli, asparagus and salad. The meal was tasty and enjoyed by all. After lunch Tessa made a devastating discovery. Her mother is an insulin dependent diabetic and while the rest home had sent her insulin with her, they had forgotten to pack the needles! Fortunately we were able to obtain one and didn't have to return to the rest home on the other side of Auckland (about an hour round trip) to get it. I can tell you we were really panicking

Next on the agena was dessert. Tessa had made a diabetic trifle which was delicious and my mother had provided a traditional Christmas pudding. A small amount of brandy was poured over the pudding and my niece tried to light it using my childproof cigarette lighter. For the first time I can remember the childproofing worked and I had to light it then try to pass it to her already lit ... it only took three goes.

Finally the kids got to play with their presents and the adults could relax over coffee. Diana and I fixed her son's bicycle, somehow the chain had come off the front derallier and wedged between the gear assembly and the frame but with a lot of jiggling and a modicum of force we freed it so he can enjoy the bike during the summer holidays.

Then finally with farewells like we would never see each other again we left to take our mothers home.

It's good to have these get togethers and it always seems a shame that we do them so seldom. It's also a little sad that two brothers are so far away, but we always think about them and often talk on the day. Family is the most important thing there is.

Originally published on Qondio

Tis the season ... for cute rescued animal stories

First-up this report from the Herald: A dog in remote north-eastern Bangladesh has become a local celebrity by breastfeeding a baby monkey back to health after it was rescued from angry villagers. The monkey sleeps with foster mum and rides around town on her back. It shows no interest in returning to the wild.

Then this report: on how a cat napped in a car's engine and was found 300km later, with a few minor burns but otherwise unharmed. It wasn't even the car of the cat's owner.

Merry Christmas everyone.

Virgin TV's Sunthorpe Problems

In the UK a new system, which automatically checks the Virgin TV programme guide, went into over-drive over the weekend with programmes such as The History of Canals showed up as ‘The History of Ca**ls’, the Will Smith film ‘Hancock’becoming ‘Hanc**k, ‘Charles Dickens’ became ‘Charles D***ens’ even the name of London football club, ‘Arsenal’, was blocked out in a bid to remove inappropriate language from the TV menu. Full article at the Telegraph

Isn't it amazing how they just don't learn? The UK, after all, contains the place that gave its name to the generic name for this effect as the Scunthorpe Problem way back in 1996.

You'd think they'd an*lyse their software better before deploying it.

Give poor children computers and walk away

Interesting opinion piece in New Scientist. The One Laptop per Child (OLPC) founder Nicholas Negroponte is interviewed on his new idea ... give kids a tablet computer and leave them to it.

"OLPC, even after giving out nearly 3 million laptops, is still criticised along the following lines: "Negroponte believes that you can give a child a laptop and walk away." Whether I ever believed that or not is now secondary. It became such a refrain that I finally asked myself about a year ago: "What if you could?" [...]"I am really going into this with an open mind. It is an experiment, and one outcome could be "no, they cannot"."

More at New Scientist

Sounds like a very interesting experiment. Negroponte and the rest of the OLPC team have already proved they could do what the naysayers said they would never achieve. Now they are advancing the experiment further. If they succeed the world will be a very different place in 20 years time.

Apple's Lawsuits Made Galaxy Tab A Household Name

From Tom Holwerda's blog on OS News

This is, of course, a tasty and delightful serving of karma for Apple. The company clearly set out to use software and design patent lawsuits as an anti-competitive club, but instead of reducing competition, they may have actually made the competition stronger. In the end, we can only hope all these anti-competitive offensive software and design patent lawsuits turn out like this. Sure, there's a lot of wasted money here on both sides, but at least the defendant gets rewarded with more sales, and the aggressor punished with lower sales

Full Article:

Killer Snake

Something out of nightmares ... 7 metre long snakes that hunt people :( Ed Jong blogs in discover magazine

"Giant snakes frequently attack people in fantasy and science-fiction stories, but such attacks are not merely the stuff of fiction. Through his extensive work with the Agta, Headland has found that a quarter of all the men have been attacked by pythons. The reticulated python is the world’s longest snake. Females typically weigh 75 kilograms (165 pounds) and grow larger than 7 metres (23 feet). The Agta, by contrast, are a small folk. Adults reach around 1.4 metres (4.5 feet) in height and weigh around 44 kilograms (97 pounds). For a snake that can swallow an entire pig, an Agta would make a mere medium-sized mouthful."

Full text at Discover Magazine:

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.

---

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.

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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.