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I have now moved this blog to http://otherwiseitwouldbequiet.blogspot.com/ see you there.
Long Train Coming
Today I heard that the bishop of London has defined flying to go on holiday as a sin because of the CO2, and that Toll have canceled the train that travels between Auckland and Wellington because it cost too much.
From what I hear the Church is made for sinners, so this could be an effort to increase market share, or an Enron-style accounting measure toredefine their missionary effectiveness.
I have long thought that the public engagement with the greenhouse theory is essentially a religious experience. There is an underlying Truth that is administered to the public via a Clergy who understand the details, but deliver easily-consumed homilies that inspire faith without understanding. At the public level the engagement is essentially superstitious - fuel from BP must be greener, and with the money I save on energy efficientlight bulbs I'll reward myself by flying to the Costa.
It's not that I don't believe in the greenhouse effect. In fact quite the opposite. That's the thing.
In some ways it's nice to see Sin back on the agenda again. For a long time it went out of fashion, which is not to say that we stopped believing, we just stopped talking. I think we've all known for a long time that SUVs are sin. A people carrier might be just as big and produce just as much CO2, but no amount of chunky tires anddiesel will ever get an SUV onto the moral high ground.
In my efforts to decide what sort of scooter to buy (right now I'm thinking a Vespa PX200) I found someone who claimed to have ridden an Indian-made Vespa rip-off from Auckland to Wellington in 9 hours with 30 litres of fuel. No doubt he was more comfortable than I was the time I took the train. At first I tried to read, but the shaking and rolling made it impossible to hold the book still enough to read. Occassionally the train would stop for long unexplained periods in the middle of nowhere.
Jeanette Fitzsimmons has requested that the line be maintained at passenger grade incase we ever need it in the future. I don't know what green heaven she believes in, but her faith is not based on any experience of the quality of that line. My suggestion for getting to heaven is that the bishop should stop heating his cathedral, and use the CO2 he saves to fly to the Costa and talk to some sinners.
Winston practises his gravitas
The pilots in the Iriquois like to fly in tight formation over my office. It's funny to think that my tax dollars are spent on training them to fly like catatonic seagulls. I suppose there's a bit of contra involved because I get paid out of the roaming revenue they throw up when they land in foreign countries.
Sometimes an Orion or a Hercules will go over on a slightly different flightpath. A Herc pilot once said to me that if you take the force out of the Air Force you're left with the Royal NZ Airline. The airline is currently putting him up in a fancy apartment in Chelsea so that he can see what it's really like to be in a military that's not taken seriously any more.
An air force 757 blew an engine over the North Shore a couple of years ago, and the analysis from Boeing concluded that we just weren't taking them out enough. It seems as though they were designed to be run like buses, and our 'classic car' usage model leads to problems. Having read the budget I'm amazed that they get them off the ground at all.
Some of the seniors here went for a flight in the DC3 that does corporate sightseeing trips. The NZ air force got rid of their DC3s years ago. Probably because they were too expensive to keep flying. I wonder if their seniors go out for sightseeing trips on the one that won't go away.
The commercial airlines have decided that the office is a corner. They dip their wings and arc around in front of the window with the trees. A 747 flying from LA is a half million dollar project. Most of that goes to Mecca as homage for the oil, although some is shared among the crew and the shareholders. Each year Air NZ uses as much fuel as 1/2 of the cars on the roads in NZ.
They say that money can't buy you happiness, but it sure can buy you a war. Helen has decided to send a million dollars to help the Palestinians effected by the latest one. NZ001 to LA has chipped in another hundred thousand.
I wonder if we spend more training helicopter pilots, subsidising Air NZ, saving Palestinians, or flying Winston around the planet to keep him out of parliament. And why does someone who has so little to say get so upset about being misreported?
Flying in the face of Health and Safety
'Anyone own a blue Honda yada yada yada - please move it or it will be towed'.
For the first time I read one of these emails and had a worrying sense of connection with it. Blue, grey, it's really just a matter of lighting isn't it? There's no fear without commitment.
As I was driving in this morning I heard a friend from university describe her escape from Lebanon on the radio. We have also been trying to invite the parents of an Israeli friend over for dinner. Now their answerphone messages are interposed by radio interviews discussing much the same things that we are yet to actually talk about.
The figures just in show that workplace deaths in New Zealand were dramatically up for the last 12 months. A representative from the Department of Labour was on the radio with message that slackness with Health and Safety rules is causing more deaths. The interviewer asked if there were repeat offenders, but the reply was that a death in the workplace is such a dramatic event that a repeat is highly unlikely.
I find it hard to understand why anyone would send a high explosive several kilometers through the air in the general direction of a built up area. I also find it bizarre that there are people who operate or hide military equipment among the houses of their friends and relatives. This is not condoning the Israeli attempts to blow such people up along with the arsenals, but can you imagine me asking if I could borrow your garage to store a few Katyushas and small arms rounds?
Last week in Nazareth a small Arab boy was killed by a rocket fired from Lebanon. Around 6 months ago I was walking the same streets with my little girl. There was a very nice guy running the kebab restaurant, and the little girl in question ate so many olives that she was sick for the rest of the afternoon. It was very difficult to find a park though.
I can judge the Honda driver for parking illegally, but I just can't get over the health and safety implications of this war.
I cycled to a dinner party last week where there was a question about whether the IDF would use the same techniques if the terrorists were living amongst Israelis. Sadly we don't need to ask the reverse to Hisbollah.
Raising the coffee bar
There is a bean-to-cup coffee machine in our work kitchen that has a rather Aryan take on Blue Mink's vision of coffee-coloured people. As I stood before it this morning in a desperate search for consciousness on a Friday morning, it gradually dawned on me that having driven in today I could have brought my own machine and beans. Quality coffee is a bit of a chicken and egg thing - you need to be fairly awake to make a good one, but then...
I feel as though driving in to work is my guilty little secret. It seems to take half as long as the train, even when the traffic is fairly bad. Buying a second car brings large TCO problems, but taking the family wagon on days when it's just sitting there is pretty cheap, and with all the time I save I arrive early enough for a free park.
This week I took the train on the two fine days, the bike when it rained, worked from home when there was an interesting but optional meeting at work and drove on the day of the pub crawl.
I'm not completely incompetent though. A colleague complimented me today, saying that she thought my design document was 'properly framed'. I chose to go for a plain white frame around the page this time. At school we used to rule a border in red pen, but it was very hard to get the corners to line up precisely. I also took a certain amount of pleasure in reusing the word 'colleague' in an email reply, where the correct spelling was a counterpoint to the helpdesk jockey who couldn't quite stretch his pinky to the 'a' key.
The new improved (and shorter) primary school curriculum came out today. I guess the children feel smarter if they focus on smaller achievements.
Are you thinking what I'm thinking?
On the train this morning I read a book review that implied Turing's autism was responsible for the Allies winning WWII. I guess it took a guy with a brain that was more like a machine to make a machine that was more like a brain.
Later on a vendor asked me whether he should set up an automated process to send a regular data feed through to us. I nearly replied, 'Well it all depends - you might get better reliability out of an employee with OCD than a script on a server running Windows', but on reflection I said we cared more about results than methodology.
Tonight I'm off to see some live comedy. It's funny how funny it is when someone says what you're not allowed to say. If I said it out loud, I might stop getting paid, so I pay him to say it to see how it sounds. Mind you, I don't feel I've got value for money when it's just a sex-offense-laugh formula.
Speaking of offensive, I dropped past the AA this morning to carry out the first part of my epic journey to a new drivers license. Behind the locked door the employees had circled their chairs and were having a motivational meeting. It was then that I noticed that the office opens half an hour later on Tuesdays. The one day I happen to turn up. And they're sitting there motivating themselves while all the customers stand outside with their noses pressed against the glass waiting for something to happen. I didn't wait for the group hug.
Apparently Turing was sentenced to have estrogen injections to cure (or punish?) his homosexuality. There's a kind of existentialism within the atheist community that at any given time extends perfect forgiveness for past scientific wrongs, thereby updating it's continuous supremacy to religion. In religious language you would call this grace without repentance. When Turing committed suicide the injections had given him artificial breasts, but apparently this was not enough to cure him. There's always some sadness when you see someone dying, rejected by the ones he saved.
I'm off to the AA now.
bureaucrazy
Today I took the car to work, and in spite of the traffic and parking it took half an hour less than my usual train/walk or cycle trip. I figure that if I bought another car (did I say car? I meant rampaging 4wd truck), it would cost about $12/day in fixed costs (devaluation, tax, insurance, repairs), and another $3.75 in petrol. The train costs about $35/day, but receives a subsidy of $31/day, so comes in at a tidy $4. I would save 1 hour worth of commuting by driving in, so that would value my time at around $12/hour.
On Friday night there was an interesting discussion at my brother in law's house that reached the conclusion that rather than being an agent of certain death, a scooter is a relatively safe and efficient way to get around town. The fixed costs for a scooter come in at around $5/day, and the fuel about $1. So for $2 a day I could get 5 hours extra in my week. That's pretty good economy.
To get to commutation nirvana I need to get a motorcycle license, which led me to an interesting call to the LTSA this morning. It appears that my license is about to expire in a few months time. When it does, I need to go to an office somewhere, pay $50, have a photograph taken, get my signature recorded and be issued a temporary license until the real one comes in the mail 30 days later. To ride a motorcycle I need to sit my restricted license. This involves going to the same office, paying a different $50, having the photo, recording the signature, getting the temporary license, waiting 30 days. Then 6 months later I will need a full license, and guess what, I have to go to the office, pay $50, have the photo, record the signature, get the temporary license, wait 30 days.
So I tried to suggest to the helpful woman on the phone that I could save some money and time by doing the restricted update instead of the expiry update. It turns out this won't work, because you can only clear an expiry with an update to a full license. So when I sit the full license that will clear the expiry. But I have to wait 6 months to sit it, and by then it will have expired. She was more than happy to issue me a restricted license that would expire in 2 months time, if I wanted to do it that way around.
And that's why I need a rampaging 4wd truck.
Frustrating fenestration
It's always with a certain sadness that I see bricked up windows. This is the sunny side of the building.
Training
A few weeks ago I was stuck on a train for 2 hours due to a power cut, and against my better judgement I began talking to fellow commuters near the end of the ordeal. Today I bumped into the one who looks like Judy from Southfields, and felt compelled to say 'Hi'. I console myself by thinking that since it was the late train (the one you end up with if you miss the one that gets you there on time), she was already in a bad mood.
I discovered yesterday that my brother-in-law holds my child responsible for his child's flu. He traces the infection to an incident that he refers to as 'THE sneeze', and without dwelling on the details, it would be fair to say that more than one tissue was required for the cleanup on little E.
It's odd to think that all around the city are tiny little viruses being sneezed and coughed from person to person, and each person in turn goes through their own personal immune response. Up goes the temperature, out comes the phlegm, down go the pills. A thousand emails and phone calls to say, "I don't think I'm going to make it in today". The boxes of tissues fly off the shelves. Daytime TV ads register higher than normal response rates. Gyms fall silent.
It's not that I'm offended by Judy's twin sister and her rejection response. Having had it so many times I'm immune. It's just strange to think that we've probably bred viruses together.
Is it over yet?
My suggestion for improving football is that everyone should go home and forget about it. Another suggestion I heard was that they should forget about the hour and a half of passing the ball to each other and just go straight to the penalty shootout. Other than the obvious advantage of saving a lot of time in from of the television, it would also mean that soccer players wouldn't have to wash their uniforms so often, and as anyone who has stayed in a hotel in the last 10 years will know, unnecessary washing of laundry is the reason the environment is falling apart.
Speaking of falling apart, the last 2 winters I've had a flu virus that's taken me out for more than the customary 5-7 days. Last year it finished off with a rash, and this year my heart has stopped beating regularly, missing about 1 in 10 beats. The rash was strange, but the absent-minded rhythm has certainly trumped it. Next year I think it's going to be temporary paralysis.
A coverup conspirasy
Some guys in the cubicle next to me were discussing an advertisement in an engineering magazine this morning. They came to the conclusion that the advertiser had created the picture by removing a beach ball from the photograph and replacing it with the piece of equipment on sale. Why were these guys spending so much time looking at a picture of a woman in a bikini and yet talking about the industrial equipment she was holding? Perhaps it shows that marketing works.
For much the same reason, there was extensive press coverage of the 60th anniversary of the bikini this week. I'm not sure that extensive coverage is an appropriate description, but there were lots of articles, and of course photos.
Context is a curious thing. A bikini on some beaches can be seen as overdressing, but a one-piece on the street is definately underdressing. Unless the street has beach frontage, in which case it's appropriately modest.
There was another article a week ago where the department of social welfare (I know they have a new name now, but it keeps changing, and I've stopped listening) was voicing it's concern about young girls in Rotorua going out at night in summer clothes during the winter because they thought it was fashionable.
We've pretty much worked out that the government can't run businesses to save itself (did someone say 'electrification of the main trunk line'?), I wonder if one day we'll work out that it's about as good at being a surrogate parent as well.
Fashion pretty much requires an element of impracticality, as does childhood. So it's no real surprise that children take fashion so seriously.
My daughter was particularly upset about wearing a warm top yesterday. In place of a more sophisticated argument she simply repeated 'no' throughout the process.
It's so easy to know what you don't want, but so difficult to find something you do. Which brings us back to advertising.
Drifting onto the platform
For the first time this morning I saw the pink glow of sunrise on the houses across the valley as I walked to the station. The condensation on the station lamp posts trickled down leaving a pattern on the platform evoking the image of a methodical dog. A light mist hung weightless over the estury, and the basin was a perfect mirror through the train windows.
However I refuse to acknowledge that anything that includes me being outside and walking around at 7:30 in the morning is in any way 'beautiful'.
The train was around 20 minutes late, and was packed when it arrived. Apparently this is because the maintenance workers are carrying out industrial action that has them only working their scheduled hours. Industrial action? If they are working their normal hours, and getting their normal pay it all seems pretty normal to me. In a sad kind of way the delays and packed trains are kind of normal too.
Apparently if you divide the subsidy that trains in Auckland receive by the number of commuters that use them, it works out at $60,000 per year. Man, if I was in charge of that budget, I wouldn't use trains. I would bulldoze a corridor from where these people live, right into the middle of town. Then I would run giant machines up and down the corridors to transport them in and out in speed and comfort. Oh, wait a second...
If you make a 2 year old stand on a platform and don't let any of the people around talk to her, it's a punishment called 'time out'. I call it 'time out' too, but for completely different reasons.
Salt of the earth
Last year I went collecting for the kidney foundation with she who must not be named in blogs. One of the few people who opened the door was an older woman who replied to our pitch with something along the lines of 'I have kidney cancer, so I'm down at the oncology ward all the time, and know a lot about the kidney foundation'. Depending on how you look at it, you could say that the fact that my fellow collector didn't hear the first part of that sentance was a good or a bad thing. On the plus side it wasn't until we were walking away from the door that she realised how inappropriate her reply was.
Other than that amusing and slightly uncomfortable memory the other thing I took away from our night of freelance charity-guilt was a growing unease for salt. One of the primary building blocks of a culture is the framing of the question 'What is wrong?' and the variety of answers define the strands within that culture. For example, 'What is wrong? The All Blacks need to get a new orange boy. The world is getting too hot. There's not enough investment. Gay marriage is illegal. The liberal media is winning hearts and minds. yada yada. Well it turns out that there is a whole community where the answer is "There's too much salt in our food, and therefore in our bodies". And they take it quite seriously.
The Big Food marketing people are on to it as well. They don't put 'salt' in their list of ingredients, they put 'Sodium'. If you remember any of that chemistry they shoved down your throat in school, then you will know that the molecular weight of Sodium is less than Chlorine, so the ratio of Sodium per serving by weight is less than half the ratio of salt per serving by weight. So it's a sneaking little way of under-reporting the salt content.
Today I managed to save $1 by going for the non-fresh soup alternative at the supermarket, but I couldn't help notice that it had 50% more salt in it.
I do like the taste of salt though. And kidney cancer will give me something to talk about when the collector calls.
Connecting
I just signed a card for a workmate who I don't know. Not only do I not know him, but the nickname that everyone else seemed to call him by was sufficiently obscure that I couldn't find his picture in the staff photo list. 'All the best xxxx'. I don't know what I will do without you.
At my farewell from the last place I worked there were a couple of guys I'd never seen before. It turned out they thought that another NZer called Rhys was leaving. It was very special that they stayed for the whole lunch and didn't just leave when it became obvious.
Today a guy called Mauryse sent me a text to say he'd changed his mobile number. The last time we had a text conversation I thought I'd made it quite clear to him that I was not Russell, I was just the guy who had his phone number now. I guess he didn't listen when Russell told him either. Or maybe that's why Russell didn't tell him.
Last week I discovered the reason we'd got no messages on our home phone for about a fortnight was because the cable was a loose fit, and it had fallen out of the back of the machine. I saved a lot of money by cancelling the network-based voicemail and switching to a machine. Now I'm wondering if I could just unplug it again and save time as well as money.
It seems so easy to have random conversations with strangers, and so difficult to organise a get togethor of friends.
Mind you, this month I think I'm going to be able to make it to De Post.
Writely Invitations
Excuse me for being a bit geeky here.
Google recently launched an online spreadsheet application (http://spreadsheets.google.com/) including all sorts of useful features to do with collaboration and autosaving. I'm finding myself using it because it is useful, rather than just because it's a new toy, which is always a good sign.
They recently bought a company called Writely (http://www.writely.com) so that they could do the same thing with a word processor. Unfortunately they have closed access to the site until the transition is complete, so you can only sign up if someone invites you.
Well I was fortunate enough to be invited, so I thought it's only fair to return the favour. If you put your email address in a comment to this blog entry, then I will send you an invitation. I suggest that you create a temporary email address at some free webmail service first, so that your real email address isn't up on this website for all the world to see.
It's not you, it's me
Why do people who buy me music always get albums they like instead of ones I like? And why don't people like the cool music I get them? There's just no accounting for taste.
I've noticed that if I drink the high caffeine/low flavour coffee that comes out of the work bean-to-cup espresso machine I tend to work faster. This really removes any incentive they may have to give us decent coffee.
I managed to collect a couple of toffee pops as they made their way into the cookie jar this afternoon. They had curiously dark chocolate on them, and now I can't stop wondering whether it's a new version, or whether it was a freakish anomoly.
I had an interesting conversation the other day where the upshot was a request that I should talk more about what I'm thinking, and that I should interrupt less often.
And this is the problem. If all you're thinking is random quirk, then anything you say will appear to be an interruption, because no-one is talking about it already.
Which reminds me of another conversation I had on what I did not consider to be a date, when someone complained that I never told her what I was thinking. Perhaps she just thought I would think about more interesting things. Or should I say people?
I have an ongoing sense of guilt that my daughter's DVD does not constitute the wide and varied input that she should be getting at this age. I think I should buy her another one.
I've also taken to hiding food that I'm eating when I'm around her. The complexities of toffee pops are not something that should trouble her innocent mind. There is plenty of fruit if she's hungry.
And I often wonder what she's thinking. We got her a new polar fleece jacket, and every time she's put it on she says 'I'm the/a Sun/Son'. What on earth does she mean by that? We've tried to ask her all sorts of questions, but the best we can get is a serene smile.
She told me not to go to work today.
Powerlessness
On monday morning a gust of wind snapped a wire that was designed to protect from lightening, and it flicked in a graceful whiplike motion onto a 110kV line, causing a little lightening of it's own, and taking out power in the busy half of Auckland. As a result I was left standing in the train on the right of the picture for 2 hours. It seems there was no backup power supply to the signals. Or to the phone system where the people who can authorise the train driver to do anything in an emergency work. So we all just stood there. Powerless.
I know people have said a lot of bad things about carbon lately, but at least it provides power to the people.
Momentum
My polo-neck jumper was washed a couple of weeks ago for the first time in a long time. My mother-in-law figured it must have been a while because the baby-chuck on the shoulder seemed to have gone hard.
She was right about it having been there for a while, but she was wrong about which baby it belonged to. Once something works it's way to the bottom of the laundry basket, it has achieved an almost unstoppable momentum.
By comparison, my new scooter has no momentum. If pushed sufficiently, it will coast for several metres before grinding to a halt as it converts my frantic efforts into the sound of an underinflated tyre on tarmac. As if to taunt me, Mr Sedgway appeared from nowhere at lunchtime and glided past with a patronisingly subdued high-pitched whine, up the hill. I despise you übergeek.
Having made a marginal call with the scooter, I now feel compelled to spend more money to prove that it wasn't a waste in the first place. This is what an investor would call throwing good money after bad.
I expect that by the time my jumper is washed again, that first baby will have found the scooter in the back of the garage, painted it pink and given it to her daughter. And when that day comes, I will be vindicated that it was a wise investment after all.
crema and coconut creme
This morning I had what I think is the best espresso shot I have made since returning to New Zealand. The beans were wild grown Bonga Forest beans roasted to about 15 seconds into the second crack the day before yesterday.
I slightly overfilled the filter basket with around 15.1g of coffee ground at the fifth notch from the arrow on the grinder. At first I wasn't sure if I had filled the group properly and did a quick second raise, which is usually a very marginal technique, but one that I fortunately got away with. During the pull, the stream of coffee formed a thick tail that bubbled, hooked and swung as it came down, with a very promising viscosity. The tiger striping alternated between a dark brown, and a brownish terracotta.
In the cup it took around a minute for the crema to settle to a steady state and form a head. It had a silky texture, and the firm persistance of a slightly warmed marshmellow. The flavour was pure and rich, with the mellow, vanilla sweetness that makes this bean my favourite, without even the slightest hint of bitterness. There was a deep, rich, chocolate-type flavour that was consistent right through to the aftertaste.
Clearly there was no question of brushing my teeth after a coffee like that, and even by the time I got to the viaduct there was a pleasant remnant of the aftertaste.
Having overindulged a little with the cookie jar at work, I've decided to cut back on my consumption. However I had to delay lunch today, and a couple of chocolate covered coconut creme biscuits seemed to be a good way to bridge the gap. They also seemed a good idea for the gap between lunch and afternoon tea, but I can't imagine there will be much justification for them later in the day.
Talking about nothing
I have noticed an interesting thing about communicating with software developers. No matter what you say to them, they will hear it as, 'Are you man/woman enough to solve this problem?', or 'You look kind of busy, could you think of a reason why my task is technically impossible as an excuse for not doing it?'
And I have to hold my hand up here and say that when I was a developer I really only ever answered those two questions.
It's a wonder that any communication ever happens. I know a few people who answer every question as if I had asked, 'Give me a detailed breakdown of exactly what you did on some random day this week. Don't miss any details, regardless of how important, and try to choose a day when nothing exciting happened.' And we all know what happens if you let a software developer choose a conversation topic.
But the one that I find the most difficult is when someone asks a problem, I respond to it, so they restate their problem, I respond to it in a different way, and on and on. Look, do you want this problem fixed or what?
I think that chosing to listen to someone is a gift. It's roughly the same as giving someone a piece of chewing gum when you open the packet, or a coin at a vending machine. It costs something, but not a lot, and there is quantifiable value being transferred. And it happens about as often too.