Stand-up

Yesterday for the first time I tried my hand at stand-up comedy. The Classic Comedy Club (CCC) on Queen Street has an open mike night on Mondays, after a lot of thinking I decided to have a go.
When I say a lot of thinking, I mean a lot. I first thought about trying to do a stand-up routine when I lived in Wellington, and I moved back to Auckland in late 1998. This means it was at least 10 years back, and I'm sure it was a year or two before that. In those days there were no Comedy Clubs in Wellington, and I suspect none in New Zealand.
I was inspired to actually put my hand up for the open mike night when work was looking for suitable venues for our Christmas function. The CCC was short-listed, and this got me motivated to actually do something about this long term interest. I had a thought about what I could do on the bus into work one morning & brain dumped it over lunch. I didn't have the requisite 7 minutes of material, but I had enough to tell me I could do 7 minutes. Tessa & I went down to CCC that night and checked it out. The place seemed friendly and supportive, and the other raw talent we saw were (mostly) competent, but not so good that I'd fear for the quality of my likely effort.
A couple of days later I phoned them up and booked myself in for yesterday. Tessa listened to several early drafts of my material, and we went down the following Monday to have another look. Last night, I was up. Tessa, Angela, and I went off to dinner together and then wandered up to the club early as I had to check in at least 1/2 an hour before the start. Two other workmates came along to wish me well, Dazz arrived while we were waiting and Robert arrived with Ruth, his wife, a little later.
I was the first up in the second half of the evening. I chose to sit with my friends for the first half of the show before going up to the green room during the intermission. In retrospect I think from a technical viewpoint I would have been better off being in the green room & talking to the other performers, but from an emotional viewpoint I needed to be with my support network in the audience because as the moment I would have to stand up infront of the audience got closer and closer I was getting more and more stressed.
A professional comedian from Kaitaia named Figjam was the MC for the evening and when he introduced me I walked onto the stage and began my act. To my surprise I got a good laugh from my opening ... surprise because, althought I knew I had some good material, I regarded the opening as fairly weak ... but it got a better laugh than some of what I thought was my better material later in the show.
Everything went pretty well until about 3/4 of the way through the sketch, when I lost the plot a bit. I knew I was losing it and quickly went to the end. I left to a good laugh and went outside to calm down before rejoining my party in the audience.
With it being my first time I had no expectation of it going perfectly. On the whole I think I managed to present my material better than I expected. One part of the sketch was a fairly complex sequence of witicisms that I kept re-ordering during practice. I'd re-ordered it so many times that I was hopelessly confused how to present it, so I wrote the order on my hand. On the video Tessa did, I was obviously having trouble reading it off my hand ... despite the way that I liked it, the sequence got no laughs so I might as well not have bothered. There were a couple of other bits that I really liked, but which I completely forgot to use on the stage.
The other thing that was obvious to me on stage was that I was having problems with the microphone. Right at the start I wandered away from the mike, completely forgetting that I needed to take it with me. In a couple of places I needed both hands free, so I put the mike back on the stand.
I'm going to go back in a few weeks and have another go with the same material. Before that I'm going to review the video, eliminate the bits that didn't work and reinstate the bits I forgot to use. I'm also going to freeze my script a few days out so I can just practice the final version. Maybe I'll still ad-lib on stage a little, but I need to have a rock solid sequence I can return to to avoid getting lost again.
I'm also going so see if I can source a cheap radio mike. It would make it so much easier to be able to both walk around and have both hands free. For the future, I already have an idea for two other completely different sequences and so if I do decide to keep at it I'm sure I can keep up a supply of fresh material for quite a while.

This wasn't supposed to happen

When I decided to split my blog into three it looked quite simple. Any domaining related posts to Domaining .NZ, my philosophical and similar views to ¿Que? & "Dear diary" type entries here.

The plan got it's first real test today & I'm not at all sure it's a success. I wrote an 1800 word article giving my opinions on Internet branding, or more precisely selecting a domain name for a business. It doesn't belong in ¿Que?, it doesn't belong in Domaining .NZ either, as it's talking about the end user process of selecting a domain name for their business and it doesn't really belong here either. In the end I decided to post it to ¿Que? blog with a link from Domaining .NZ.

It was really tough deciding where to put it, and this suggests that as I write more articles on general domain name related topics I'm goin to have to go through this process again. The thought has occurred to me that maybe I need a fourth blog, but I'm not going create one as its' already pretty obvious that I'm not going to have enough content to keep the three I already have going strong.

There's also a weird postscript to this, I'm going to need to write a follow-up on the wisdom of buying generic domains & that will need to go in Domaining NZ. So, am I actually writing three blogs, or just one with three pigeonholes?

Yonkly - Open Source clone of Twitter

Interesting development. Someone named Emad Ibrahim has launched an open source version of Twitter. Microblogs with links to your friends' entries and posting via the web or through txt messages. I'll be watching this one with interest.

More at Site

Auckland Daily Photo

I just stumbled on this amazing photo blog by a Lachezar Karadzhov about whom I know absolutely nothing except he takes great photographs. According to the site he was a finalist in the Best Oceanian Photoblogs 2007 competition for his Lachezar's photo_notes site, and I can well believe this.

As the name suggests, he publishes a photograph of Auckland every day and he's been doing it for around 18 months. My favourite photo (so far) on his site is The corner which shows a cyclist at the corner of Alex Evans and upper Symonds Streets. He's manipulated the photo to enhance the colour of the advertising posters and made the rest of the photo black and white, except for the baleful red glare of two traffic lights.

Well worth a browse and I'll be returning frequently.

Auckland Wine and Food Show

I'm bushed. Tessa & I went down to the waterfront for the Foodtown sponsored Auckland Wine and Food Show. I spent about 7 hours, mostly on my feet wandering around the various stalls, taking in the outdoor entertainment and sampling, sampling, sampling.

The entertainment was varied stating with a light jazz act followed my a couple of mediocre pop music acts. Then came three impersonators, the first Brett Wallace as an excellent Neil Diamond impersonator. He looks a little like Diamond in the 70s, but when I closed my eyes I felt I was listening to the real Neil Diamond, especially during his Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show finale.

I wasn't impressed by Brendon Chase's Elvis Presley I think he should join the real Elvis on the checkout at Foodtown.

The last impersonator we watched was Steve Larkins as Freddy Mercury of Queen he had the moves right, the voice was great and he took the crowd with him. Full marks to him. As we drove home we discussed him and felt it was a shame that a man with his obvious talent hadn't managed to make it big as himself. He certainly had the talent.

Later on, Ben Lomis was booked to impersonate a pop singer, but we were tired and decided to go home. The show was set to wind up with Debbie Harwood about now, but we're already home.

The entertainment is really a side show & we were there to see and sample food. There wasn't much here that was new to me and it doesn't really compare to the much larger Auckland Food Show. It seems that about a third of the stalls were wine or beer, which is fair enough for a wine and food festival. There was a lot of bulk produced & semi-specialist cheese and smallgoods like sausages, and salami, a smaller number of stands with olives, pickles, etc and not a lot else. Tessa felt there were less stalls this year compared to last and I certainly felt there was a lot less variety.

Rating 5 out of 10. Worth going to, but I wouldn't worry if I missed it.

On the other hand, a bonus to Foodtown for handing out mini-fruit kebabs. Very refreshing.

Where's the postings gone?

As it's title suggests, this blog is supposed to be an occasional diary, basically talking about what I'm doing. It's had a lot of long silences and it's ended up being a confused mishmash of personal news, my views on the world and domaining related essays.

I've decided to split it into three. This, the original blog, will be for personal news & revert to the occasional diary status, and I've created two other blogs for the other postings:

• Domaining NZ will be for domaining related posts and
• ¿Que? for my world views

I'll be moving relevant postings here over to the other two blogs. I'll leave pointers to the new locations for the articles here for a while & then delete them.

Bad Code Coming

(after John Fogerty)

I see the bad code a-coming.
I see trouble on the way.
I see corruption and crashes.
I see bad times today.

Don't compile tonight,
Well, it's bound to cause you strife,
There's some bad code in the pool.

I hear the crash logs a-spooling.
I know the end is coming soon.
I fear access violations.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.

Don't compile tonight,
Well, it's bound to blight your life,
There's some bad code on the disk.

Hope you got your things together.
Hope you are quite prepared for fright.
Looks like we're in for bad behaviour.
One byte is taken for a byte.

Don't compile tonight,
Well, it's bound to cause you strife,
There's more bad code on the rise.

Lunch, glasses, and shopping

Whew, I've just written a small website from the ground up with NVU. I don't recall the Suse version of NVU as being this painful, but on my Ubuntu system it was slow going. The version installed may be from 2006, but it felt like editing with Frontpage 97. It's like the last 10 years hadn't happened. Before I try this again, I'll definitely have to investigate alternatives.

Normally I wouldn't try building a site in html, but it was only going to be a single page, it ended up as 4, and a CMS seemed overkill.

The site's called "Glasses for less" and was inspired by some recent events.

We were going to have lunch with Diana, my sister, on Saturday & Tessa broke her glasses frame. This story is told in more detail on the site, but to summarise, we stopped off at the optometrists in Lynnmall and were told that the repair would take two or three days. Time she doesn't have.

Lunch was as quiet as lunch with a 4 year-old ever gets, especially one covered in face paint, but was great fun.

We knew my sister has used an overseas supplier for glasses & after lunch picked her brain about them. She told the story, and Tessa picked her frames. We then went home to get her prescription and ordered the glasses. With any luck they'll be here in just over a week.

After this I decided it would be a great idea to document the process. As it happened, there was a suitable domain name in the drop auction last night, so I grabbed it.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Interesting search engine "LemmeFind"

I Recently stumbled across a new search engine aggregator in the Dogpile vein.

This one's called LemmeFind. It has a number of localised searches by country code and the New Zealand version gives some great results from NZ websites.

As a comparison, here's the same search for the 1plus header text from Dogpile & LemmeFind (NZ)

My only gripe is that there is a bug where if you use quotes on the search string, the page 2,3,4 links omit the search term. I tried to alert them but their feedback form is "disabled because of abuse" and their whois information lacks useful email addresses.

Swiss in Liechtenstein 'invasion'

The traditionally neutral Swiss army has staged an unplanned invasion after troops blundered into Liechtenstein. A 171-strong Swiss company got two kilometres into its neighbour before realising the mistake and heading back. Liechtenstein authorities made light of the intrusion, saying they only knew about it when the Swiss told them.

It sounds like it's time for the Swiss army to have a GPS tool in their famous knives. Or maybe just something more accurate than a cheap cuckoo clock to know the time when navigating by the stars. Or just perhaps it's something more sinister than that. The Swiss population has been rising, are they practising for all-out conquest to provide leibensraum?

Dunedin Fragment

Hard to know where to start.

After an eventful morning that I won’t dwell on here, Tessa dropped me at Auckland airport & I caught the flight to Christchurch. The flight was uneventful & surprisingly short — I had expected it to be about twice the time of a Wellington flight, but it was only a little over half as long again.

I checked in & was soon searching for food. Dunedin seemed pretty much closed, but I found a Pizza place & satisfied my hunger before climbing into bed. At Christchurch I had about 15 minutes on the ground before it was time to board the flight to Dunedin. The flight crew were friendly, but nothing could disguise the age or size of the aircraft; nor the propellors.

None-the-less we made it. First surprise, the airport is a very long way out of the city. Still the shuttle bus delivered me and two others safely to the university college

Add 1 to Cobol Giving Cobol

In 1992 I used to work at a place that was transitioning from Cobol on IBM's VSE operating system to Oracle (Forms, Reports, etc) on HP/UX. I was writing Rexx and C and learning C++.
Usenet's alt.folklore.computers was on my reading list and one thread there was a discussion "If the object orientated successor to C is C++, what is the object orientated successor to Cobol?"
When I zapped off a spoof to alt.folklore.computers in January 1992 I never dreamed it would get reprinted in sigplan notices or that there would be citations to the sigplan notices reprint of it floating around 13 years later.
I'd like to correct two widespread inaccuracies. Although I guess I "invented" the language in its published form by giving a sample of a horrid, if ficticious, dialect of Cobol, I didn't invent the name. Secondly, the initial publication was on Usenet not Sigplan notices. This posting was reprinted in SIGPLAN Notices 27(4):90-91, April 1992.
As far as I can tell, the name was first suggested seven days earlier by a Lars Soltau (space at ncc1701.stgt.sub.org). My posting was a follow-up to a follow-up of his article.
I remember when I read that thread & saw "Add 1 to cobol giving cobol" I had the inspiration for a Cobol stripped of all Cobol's redeeming features with the worst imaginable implementation of object orientation bolted on the side. I really feel that Lars (whoever he is) should get some credit.
The widly reprinted entry could be re-worded 'A tongue-in-cheek suggestion by **** Clement for an object-oriented COBOL inspired by a one-liner by Lars Soltau.'
The funny thing is I still remember how much fun it was to write a believable 50 line program to add 1 and 1 and print the result. Ah, the simple joys of youth.
For the record, here's the original article.
Path: sparky!uunet!wupost!waikato.ac.nz!comp.vuw.ac.nz!cavebbs!bclement Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: COBOL Message-ID: <1992jan17 .121358.6700=".121358.6700" cavebbs.gen.nz="cavebbs.gen.nz"> From: bclem...@cavebbs.gen.nz (Julia Clement) Date: Fri, 17 Jan 92 12:13:58 GMT References: <okes .92jan11224859=".92jan11224859" solb1.essex.ac.uk="solb1.essex.ac.uk"> <vkiq0lg fido.asd.sgi.com="fido.asd.sgi.com"> Organization: Children of Ingle-Frey Lines: 95 This is a repost, I don't think my original post got out, my apologies if it did get to you twice. &gt; In article <okes .92jan11224...=".92jan11224..." solb1.essex.ac.uk="solb1.essex.ac.uk"> o...@solb1.essex.ac.uk (Oke Quotes the original author: &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;No, no, no. Just as the object oriented version of C is called C++, the &gt; &gt; &gt; &gt;object oriented version of COBOL is to be called ADD ONE TO COBOL. &gt; &gt; &gt; I am not a COBOL expert, but isn't it called "ADD ONE TO COBOL GIVING COB &gt; &gt;You forgot to say please :-) Nondisclosure agreements limit the amount of precice information I can give, but object oriented CoBOL will have the following enhancements on procedural CoBOL: 1. There will be 3 new DIVISIONS: The CLASS Division where object classes will be declared The MESSAGE Division where all messages which may be used are declared The METHOD Division which associates MESSAGES with CLASSES. 2. All existing verbs are deleted from the language. Gone are ADD SUBTRACT COMPUTE (Which should never have been there in the first place, it makes CoBOL too much like ForTran) READ WRITE OPEN CLOSE. There is only one remaining verb SEND which sends messages to objects. 3. Programmers must be careful to avoid using any of the reserved MESSAGE names: ADD SUBTRACT MULTIPLY DIVIDE READ WRITE OPEN CLOSE etc. These are only permitted with built-in object types. 4. The data division has OD declarations to define Object storage. The following is a brief example of an ADD ONE TO COBOL program: IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. PROGRAM ID. SAMPLE. AUTHOR. JULIA. SOURCE COMPUTER. INTEL-386-REAL. OBJECT COMPUTER. INTEL-386-PROTECTED. REMARKS. (C) 1992, Diversity enhancements. CLASS DIVISION. DEFINE CLASS NUMBER. DEFINE CLASS INTEGER EXPANDS NUMBER. MESSAGE DIVISION. VIRTUAL MESSAGE SORT-OF-ADD APPLIES TO NUMBER INTEGER. VIRTUAL MESSAGE KIND-OF-PRINT APPLIES TO NUMBER INTEGER. ENVIRONMENT DIVISION. DATA DIVISION. OBJECT SECTION. OD NUMBER. * An empty definition, one byte minimum. 01 FILLER PICTURE X. OD INTEGER. 01 I-VAL PICTURE S9(9) COMP. WORKING-STORAGE SECTION. 77 A-NUMBER CLASS INTEGER. LINKAGE SECTION. 77 VALUE-IN PIC S9(9) COMP. METHOD DIVISION. MD CLASS NUMBER. SORT-OF-ADD MESSAGE USING VALUE-IN. EXIT METHOD. KIND-OF-PRINT MESSAGE. SEND DISPLAY "Number: " TO SYS-PRINT. EXIT METHOD. MD CLASS INTEGER. SORT-OF-ADD MESSAGE USING VALUE-IN. SEND ADD VALUE-IN TO I-VAL. EXIT METHOD. KIND-OF-PRINT MESSAGE. * Note the power of inheritence of parent methods SEND KIND-OF-PRINT OF NUMBER TO SELF. SEND DISPLAY I-VAL TO SYS-PRINT. EXIT METHOD. PROCEDURE DIVISION. ONLY SECTION. SEND MOVE 1 TO I-VAL OF A-NUMBER. SEND SORT-OF-ADD 1 TO A-NUMBER. SEND KIND-OF-PRINT TO A-NUMBER. STOP RUN. I hope that this simple example of an ADD 1 TO COBOL program suffices to show something of the power of the language, and demonstrates the true utility of a modern Business orientated object orienated language. -- Julia Clement speaking for truth, beauty, and the New Zealand way. Exception #13 at F0AF:5A1D Error code: 0000 Do you want to T)erminate the program, R)eboot, or try to C)ontinue </okes></vkiq0lg></okes></1992jan17>

He's Back

I've been away from this blog for a while.

No idea if I'll blog regularly or not, but I'm certainly intending to put something up from time to time.

Less of the "Dear diary" recounting of my days & more commentary on the things that delight, interest, or annoy me about the world.

I'll fill in some of the blanks later, oh and the not smoking didn't last. :(

The New Zealand Herald

The New Zealand Herald: "oue always suspected it, but now there is scientific evidence - many bosses are psychopaths who shouldn’t be allowed to look after a cat, let alone staff. A recent British study, backed by psychologists and management consultants here, found that a sample of senior executives scored higher on measures of histrionic, narcissistic and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders than a group of disturbed criminals. These personality disorders are characterised by superficial charm, lack of empathy and perfectionism."

Smoking Auctions

I'm sitting back, sipping on pinot noir, munching chilli tim-tams, and instead of mellowing out I'm quietly dreading tomorrow. Today, you see, is my last day as a smoker. Before I go to bed tonight I will destroy my remaining cigarettes. Tomorrow I need all my strength.
Perhaps I should certify the butt from my last cigarette and sell it on trademe. LOL.
I was reading before about how internet auctions are driving conventional auction houses out of business. Apparently Dunbar Slone has had to cut staff. As usual with our media they addressed it from the most superficial angle. Basically they took Dunbar Slone's statement and got a couple of tame "experts" on the internet to say that internet auctions are fun.
It used to be that auctioneers took 10% of the sale price, and they took it from the seller; then they started to get greedy. They both increased their cut and demanded a "buyer's premium", so whatever you bid, you had to pay more. Last time I bought something through an auctioneer I had to pay 10% of the total price (including GST) and then pay GST on the 10%. This was on top of the seller's premium, which was probably the same. So the auctioneer with no capital tied up in stock was getting something over 20% of the sale price.
I've also sat in auctions where the auctioneer decided the auction was moving to slowly & suddenly combined several lots together & knocked them down to the first bid.
The final reason I have for not attending real auctions is that if I'm interested in lot 300, I have little idea what time I should arrive, and I don't want to sit through 2 or 3 hours of watching things I have little or no interest in being sold.
I don't go to auction houses any more. They misused their near monopoly position, and lost my trust. They are overpriced and inefficient.
On the other hand, with internet auctions, the auctioneer doesn't get bored and combine lots, I don't have to wait for other lots to be sold and the fees aren't so greedy.
In the news in recent days has been the story of the auction of the last cigarette legally smoked at one Auckland bar. Very much following on from what I said the other day, here's an example of the same story being reprinted nearly verbatim around the world.

Used cigarette sells for $6948
NEWS.com.au, Australia - 9 hours ago
A CIGARETTE butt said to have been salvaged as a souvenir before a smoking ban has been sold in an Internet auction in New Zealand for $NZ7475 ($6948). ...
Sale of $7475 [cigarette] end leaves bidders gasping
New Zealand Herald, New Zealand - 15 hours ago
by David Eames. A cigarette butt auctioned on the internet has smashed visitor-number records at the TradeMe auction house on its ...
NZ cigarette butt sold for $5,300
BBC News, UK - 21 hours ago
The remains of a cigarette smoked in the final seconds before New Zealand's smoking ban came into force has been sold for more than NZ$7,400 ($5,300). ...
Last remnants of smoking New Zealand for sale
Independent Online, South Africa - 23 hours ago
Wellington - A cigarette smoked in the dying seconds before New Zealand's smoke-free laws came into effect in 2004 is set to fetch more than NZ$7 500 (about ...
Cigarette butt on auction for $5,400
AZ Central.com, AZ - Apr 13, 2005
WELLINGTON - A cigarette smoked in the dying seconds before New Zealand smokefree laws came into effect last year is set to fetch more than $5,400 in an ...
Cigarette Butt on Auction for $5,400
Reuters - Apr 13, 2005
WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A cigarette smoked in the dying seconds before New Zealand smoke-free laws came into effect last year is set to fetch more than NZ$7,500 ...
Cigarette butt on auction for more than 2,000 pounds
Reuters.uk, UK - Apr 12, 2005
WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A cigarette smoked in the dying seconds before New Zealand smokefree laws came into effect last year is set to fetch more than NZ$7,500 ...
Cigarette butt sells for R33 300
Mail & Guardian Online, South Africa - 19 hours ago
A cigarette butt said to have been salvaged as a souvenir before a smoking ban has been sold in an internet auction in New Zealand for NZ$7 475 (about R33 300 ...
Cigarette Butt on Auction for $5,400
ObviousNews.com, Canada - Apr 13, 2005
The butt, witnessed as smoked at 11:59 pm on Dec. 9 by the owners of an Auckland bar, has exceeded its NZ$1 reserve price by NZ$7,574 ...
Cigarette butt on auction for more than 2,000 pounds
ObviousNews.com, Canada - Apr 12, 2005
The successful bidder when the auction closes on Thursday will also get a certificate of authenticity and a mounted display case. ...
NZ cigarette butt on auction for $5,400
Reuters India, India - Apr 12, 2005
WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A cigarette smoked in the dying seconds before New Zealand smokefree laws came into effect last year is set to fetch more than NZ$7,500 ...

See how many coincidences you can find.

Business as usual

It's been a few days since I last posted here. The title of the blog is "An occasional diary" and I always intended the occasional. As always I've been busy. So what else is new?

Work

There was a bit of a management vacuum with the rush project. All four teams had some work to do on it, and nobody was acting as overall co-ordinator. To get the Finance work done I needed some bits of the Systems work done first, and nobody from Systems was available for a couple of days when I wanted to start. Rather than wait I got agreement from Steve & did that part of his work. Production also depended on that work & with no obvious volunteers I established communications with Aus about delivery to us of installation databases we could test against. Next thing I knew I was acting as a defacto project manager, and the expected happened. So a fair amount of the last week has been spent doing the not-so-much fun part of project management - plans, resourcing, Gantt charts and so on. Yuck! Come to think of it, are there any fun parts to project management? In other words, work is strictly business as usual.

The other other blog

I mentioned a few days ago that I'd set-up AucklandToday.com. In theory the site is strictly stock-in-hand, but I've been writing the odd news item here and there. I'm also mining a rich vein of legal content, media releases. These are lumps of text where people or organisations say what they want people to hear about their product, their company, their political views, and so forth. Sometimes they are pretty much factual reports of something they want to tell the world about, sometimes they are just adverts in sheep's clothing.

Where they look like being reasonably factual, and about Auckland of course, I add them to the site with full credit. Interestingly enough, I'm not the only one playing this game. Scoop.co.nz is very open about the fact that they publish a lot of press releases, verbatim; they see it as part of their site's unique sales proposition. At the other end of the scale are the big media. We've always see the NZPA or Reuters bylines in papers, but now thanks to the internet we can see what this actually means. A few minutes following links from Google News quickly show that dozens of papers around the world have the same text for a large proportion of their content. They're just printing what they are sent. Obviously they each decide which of the various articles they are given they will use, but for the material they don't write themselves, that's about it.

Political media statements are interesting, I wouldn't print one verbatim, but cutting and pasting quotes from two or more of them to make the guts of a story can be quite fun. I get the feeling that a lot of the reports in the media are produced in a similar way. My entry into the world of low-budget journalism seems to be business as usual.

Finally, there's headlines. When I see something about Auckland and don't have time or energy to do an article on it I just take a brief quote with a pointer to the original article, tack on a headline (usually the original one) and add an entry into AucklandToday.blogspot.com, my other, other, blog. Naturally I provide pointers to all the AucklandToday.com articles too.

Politics

Political media releases are an interesting sub-gendre. Whatever the government does, Act and National savage it. I don't expect any better from National, but Act started out as a party of principles, committed to the Liberal viewpoint. Over the last few years it's downplayed its principles in public in favour of cheap points scoring, chasing the sound bite and becoming progressively more like the conservative rump of the National caucus. I used to say there were only 3 parties in New Zealand worth voting for: The Alliance, The Greens, and Act; all parties that stood for something. Now Alliance is history, Act seems to have lost its way, and only the Greens remain. I find this sad for New Zealand. I could never vote for the Greens, I agree with many of their environmental policies, but I could never agree with some of their more extreme socialist views.

Today's effort, and it's strictly business as usual. There's been a big fuss in recent weeks about the planned new electricity transmission lines to power Auckland, and how it was going to force farmers to give up their private property to make the transmission corridor. Today the Government backed down a bit. The New Zealand Herald reported

Energy Minister Trevor Mallard has written to the Electricity Commission demanding it consider other options to the pylons proposal to meet Auckland's power needs. There has been strong opposition to a line of pylons from the Waikato. Mr Mallard has now said the commission should carry out an "independent and wide consultative process" when considering Transpower's proposed new grid upgrade from Whakamaru to Otahuhu.

So Act applauded the change? Maintained a dignified silence? No. Ken Shirley issued a press statement

"Labour’s cynical attempt to appease angry voters over its unpopular pylon plan is all about electioneering, ACT Energy spokesman Ken Shirley said today. The MP was responding to Energy Minister Trevor Mallard’s announcement that the Electricity Commission will investigate alternative methods of supplying Auckland’s future electricity needs.

“The state-owned monopoly has been studying national grid options for 10 years and all of a sudden the Government is telling it to go back to square one and start again."

and so on.

Council dog control fails, woman attacked

"A woman walking past a house in Owairaka yesterday when a Staffordshire terrier cross and a Rottweiler cross attacked her and pinned her to the ground. The dogs were not confined to the property.

"The dogs have a history of aggressive incidents and the owners have received a number of infringement notices for failing to control the animals. One of the dogs has been classified as menacing, and as such has to be neutered and muzzled in public; the other is in the process of being classified."

You can read the rest at The New Zealand Herald

I took those two paragraphs out of context from the article. One was at the top, and the other at the bottom. This wasn't just a good dog turning bad, these dogs had been trouble before. Why did the Auckland council dog control permit these dogs to be kept? Why were they permitted to stay on an unfenced property?

To me the real crime here wasn't so much the dog owners, as the negligence by the authorities allowing the public to be put at risk, and the sad thing is it happens all the time at all levels of society. Every election politicians talk about "Law and Order" and then for three years it is put in the too hard basket. Meanwhile on the odd occasion a conviction is obtained, we see dangerous criminals back on the streets within hours. The criminal underculture has been taught that they will simply get away with it. The sad thing is they usually do; burglars, dangerous dogs, unlicenced drivers, you name it, they ignore the law, and the people who are supposed to protect us are doing nothing except talk about it. For both sides, strictly business as usual.

Firefox.co.nz

Shrug. It came up for Auction; I use and recommend Firefox; It's been a bit painful finding add-ins for New Zealand search, etc. So I bid on it & won. Now to do the site justice. I've installed Mambo & found a theme that wasn't too blinding. Done some basic configuration, now to track down enough content that it doesn't look the idiot son of the open source movement. Strictly business as usual.

Can you predict the next pope?

I've just been reading, Universi Dominici Gregis, the rules for the papal election, and a couple of thoughts hit me.

Despite the way the rules go into the procedure if a non-cardinal (or even a non-priest) is elected, we all know that the next pope will actually be one of the current cardinals, and there's been a lot of talk about St Malachy / Malachi and his predictions of the next pope.

If none of the recent sedevacantist claimants to being a Pope counts as an anti-pope, then the next pope's Malachian motto would be Glory of the olive. If one is a genuine anti-pope then his motto will be Peter the Roman.

It seems to me that the Malachy prophesy can be tested on this point. There's only a hundred and seventeen cardinals under the ages of 80. Two have been excused attending because of poor health, so there's only 115 possibilities for the next pontiff.

So, here's the challenge. Before the cardinals choose the new pope, pick the one to whom each of the two possible mottos best applies. Then see if the cardinals agree with you.

If you feel that 115 people is too many to investigate, there's about 8 or 9 who have been suggested as likely candidates. Pick a couple of them & a random outsider. Post your analysis here, so others can pick different cardinals.

Teams Release

Release

We started the day knowing that to keep the project schedule we needed to get the first pre-release out today. At 10 we met and agreed there was no reason we could think for not getting it out. During the day we found a few bits and pieces, but managed to iron them out. Everything fell into place and it was out at 4:30 which meant Angela and I were free to go and play Interclub teams.

Teams

After giving up in 1998 I've been playing bridge again since July, but until today only pairs. We were asked to substitute for another pair that couldn't play tonight. It was my first attempt at teams for seven years, and Angela's first attempt ever. I wasn't expecting it to go well, and it didn't, but not for the reason we expected. When we swapped tables to play against the other pair we ended up sitting the same way as our team-mates, immediately invalidating the result. The format was a 24 board swapping opponents after 12 boards. We ddn't notice the wrong seating until after the first 12 boards, wiping out the result. At least we sat correctly for the second half so half the match counted.

When we left the table after the second round I felt we had done badly. Luckily for us the opponents did worse, so we had quite a tidy win.

Truth: Pravda Lives

Remember Pravda, the newspaper of the Comunist Party of The USSR? Despite its name meaning "Truth", for seventy nine years it was the boring parrot of whatever its totalitarian masters wasnted to say. Somehow it survived the break-up of the Soviet Union, although it did split between the hard-line comunists who now run the paper edition and a more pro-Russian faction that created the Pravda.ru news service.

Pravda.ru now sports Google ads and other signs of on-line capitalism, and recently published an article on a group of Americans who met for a weekend of fish-hook suspension.

The article was originally written in Russian the quaint translation requires careful reading which reveals more a whiff of the old communist dissaproval of western trends.

AucklandToday

Setup

After a quick bare-bones install last night I've just spent all night tonight setting up geeklog on my AucklandToday domain. The software was easier to set up than Php-Nuke, but is nowhere near as ambitious in what it does. I've created the bare bones of an information site by grabbing media releases from the regional council and entering a couple of cultural events in the calendar. First impressions are that it's clean and easy to navigate.

Visitors

It's commercial hosting, so I've got access to full stats packages. After I finished the setup tonight I had a look at the logs. I was surprised. I guess I shouldn't be, but within 8 hours of the site going live it got spidered by Google and Searchnz. It also received its first piece of spam after 10 hours. O tempore o mores.

Work, Play and Stats

The Project

Work was pretty full today. I didn't churn out a large amount of code, but I did manage to do a minimal modification to the style selection code on windows to ensure that once the 'Lite' flag is on the program is constrained to use the "standard" style for each windows. Probably only 25 lines of code all up, but selecting exactly where to place those lines of code ... that's where years of practice comes into its own.

Interesting encounters

I've been having some interesting conversations with a couple of other dabblers in the internet world. People with different, yet related interests to mine. Messaging & talking to them made me really start to think about what I am doing with this little hobby. Writing the blogs are a good way to clarify what's on my mind, and what a complex mess of different interests. The domains are like that too. There's no consistency in my portfolio. Am I spreading myself too thin? You bet! Do I need to re-appraise, or just slow down? I'll need to think about that.

I must think I'm like Marmite, the thinner it's spread, the better it is. Despite deciding I was overcommitting myself I had a little idea and went and registered a blog and three more domains called "AucklandToday". LOL. As Blackadder said "I have a plan so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel" watch that spot :).

Statistics of Popes and Saints

Down the bottom of my sidebar is a link to StatCounter.com. Statcounter is a free service that provides basic analysis on web sites, telling the owner where traffic came from. I care about my blog and I'm always interested in knowing that others are finding my work. Over the last couple of days my traffic has nearly doubled. I was having a look through the referrer and search engine stats to try and work out why.

There is a lot of interest in St Malachy's prophecies. 72% of the search strings mentioning Malachy / Malachi by name, by reference (e.g. "Irish saint predicts popes") or by prediction "glory of the olive". Another 11% were searching for information on the late pope, or the details of the election of the new pope. The rest were a mixture, for example it seems I'm not the only one interested in Technorati.