It turns out there are loads of Icebergs heading for New Zealand!
While initial reports claimed it all to be environmental terrorism, scientists just said “What? Eh? You’re having a laugh aint-cha?!”
Meanwhile New Zealanders were spotted running through the streets wearing life jackets and running for boats.

Seriously though and joking aside, it transpires there a is a reasonable sized flotilla of hundreds of Icebergs heading up from Antarctica where they broke away from  large ice shelves.
Even basic observations have counted more 250 of them and some of these are over 100 feet tall.
The nearest being about 150 miles from NZ – and closing fast

Icebergs have various classifications in size, shape and longevity according to the International Ice Patrol and they can all be seen HERE

                                                 Launched in September this year,  Ziln is New Zealand’s first internet television network. 

It does for television what access internet radio did for radio broadcasting, allowing content created by ‘micro-broadcasters’ to reach an audience.  Capturing the long tail it is New Zealand television by the people for the people. 

Funded by advertising the service has been developed by E-Cast, an Auckland based company.  They also provide an education-based service to  NZ schools and tertiary institutions, which CPIT Library subscribes to.

So if you are interested in cars, planes, hunting & fishing, extreme sports, science or real estate there is something there for you, with more channels planned.  There is also a NZ Archives channel hosting classic New Zealand newsreels from 1940-1965. In December the Greenpeace Planet A concert will be broadcast live from Myers Park in Auckland.

International channels are also available and  include Aljazeera, Bloomberg, Russia Today and Press TV, the first Iranian international news network.

Does anyone actually care what I do once I leave the Ice? Give me a reason why I should write once I leave.

Már régen írtam (a múltkorit nem számolom, mert ott lényegében képeket tettem csak fel), aminek oka több dologban lelhető fel:

• sok munkám volt (még vasárnap is),
• még több munkám volt (ilyenkor 9 után értem haza),
• lefoglalt az Immigration-re való felkészülés is,
• mikor hazaérek, Benci mindig olyan virgonc, hogy csak na, és nem is tudok, meg nem is akarok olyankor gép elé telepedni, mikor pedig elmegy aludni 9 körül, már én is fáradt vagyok.

Ez nem panasz volt, mert igazából (na jó, a 2. pontot nem annyira) élvezem mindegyiket, mert az élet attól teljes, hogy van benne jó is rossz is, könnyű is nehéz is.

Félre a rizsával (még ha basmati lenne, esetleg maradhatna), más dologgal kapcsolatban zubognak bennem a szavak. Alig bírom visszanyomkodni őket a fejembe, hogy ne csapatostól jöjjenek, hanem csak szépen, sorban, egyesével.

Reggelente mindig (alapvetően) busszal utazom Wainuiból Lower Huttba, ahol vonatra szállok (ezen drágaszágokról is lesz majd szó, mert a vasutas vér nem válik vízzé /bár hosszú évek után az állandó alkoholtartalma igencsak megnőhet) és begurulok Wellington központjába. Az ezt követő séta hangulatát a múltkori képnaplóval már érzékeltettem, most inkább a megelőző fázisok kerülnek terítékre.

Busz

Nem szerettem buszozni régebben, mert olvasni nem tudok (megfájdul a fejem olyankor), ami pedig komoly hátrány a vonattal szemben. Itt viszont két okból mégis simán belefér:

• gyönyörű a környék (ahogy hazafelé átérünk a gerincen és feltárul a zöldellő fák borította hatalmas hegyek által körülölelt völgy, az minden egyes alkalommal örömmel tölti el szívemet),
• reggelente pont annyi időt vesz igénybe a szemtornám, amíg beérünk Lower Huttba.

Két busz szokott jönni a 8 előtti pár perces időszakban, igazából a véletlentől függ, hogy melyik ér oda előbb a megállónkba. Az egyik (160-as) nem tesz egy plusz kört (Parkway loop), a másik (165-ös) – általam nemes egyszerűséggel csak falujárónak hívott – bemegy a Parkway nevű részbe, felszedni az ottaniakat is.

Ugyanazt a vonatot érem el mindkettővel, úgyhogy jobb szeretem a falujárót. Ez még a kezdeti időszakból van, amikor a buszon sokkal jobb idő volt, mint kint (időnként még fűtés is! ) de most már amúgy is.

A napokban méláztam egyik reggel a bordó/piszkosfehér csíkos ülésen bambulva, az ablak mellett hol lassan, hol gyorsan siklott tova a zöld udvarok szegélyezte takaros porták sora, a nap ragyogva szórta sugarait ránk, egyszerű halandókra, és az élet szép volt (van, lesz, több igeidőt nem tudok).

Nem szokott megtelni a jármű, mindenki kényelmesen elfér, az utasok jelentős részét látásból ismerem is:

• a terebélyes asszonyság a szomszédból, aki a Wainui High Schoolban dolgozik, és 3 megállót jön a suliig,
• két 6-7 éves kislány, akik a Parkway loop első megállójában szállnak fel, az anyjuk meg integet utánuk (egyikük – egy kis szőke – nagyon aranyos, amolyan tündéri és gyermeki, Hanah Montana táskájával mindig sietve teper és veti le magát egy ülésre, aztán kapaszkodva az előtte lévő ülés támlájába, mereszti szemét a nagyvilágba, hogy a Rosemary sulinál szálljon le),
• egy kötött sapkás, 50 körüli nő, aki mindig ott száll le, ahol ránézésre semmi értelme, mert más busz nem jár arra, ő pedig mindig beül a megállóba, miután kiszállt,
• két, sötétbarna bőrű, általam felsősnek beazonosított lány, fogszabályzóval, görnyedt tartással,
• a buszból kinézve egy szőke lány bandukol mindig a 170-es megállója felé, akinek a két legjellegzetesebb vonása, hogy mindig mosolyog, és oltári módon piros az arca, szerintem egyszer leégett, aztán azóta mindig
• a Parkway loop utáni első megállónál szokott felszállni két ázsiai származású kissrác (egyik tutira alsós, a másik már talán felsős), akik a világoskék-sötétkék egyenruhájukban olyan büszkén feszítenek, ingben-nyakkendőben, mintha dörzsölt üzletemberek lennének. Főként a kisebbiknél figyeltem meg egy nagyon lazának, vagánynak látszó mozzanatot, ahogyan a Snapper kártyáját beteszi a zakója felső zsebébe.
• ahogy ráfordulunk a gerincre vezető útra, a 170-es busz megállójában 4 középiskolás lány várja mindig a busz, piros felsőben, szürke-fehér kockás szoknyában, úgy ülnek a megállóban, mint fecskék a villanydróton,
• beérve Lower Huttba egy dagi nő szokott felszállni, szegénynek nehezen megy a két lépcső teljesítése, aztán azt sem irigylem, aki mellé leül, mert az ülések nem teljesen kétszemélyesek, vagy ha igen, akkor ebből ő másfél,
• a Rosemary sulinál egy göndör hajú, 11-12 év körüli srác szokott felszállni, akinek ritka jó dumája van, meg az egész hanglejtése olyan, mint az igazán jó humoristáknak van, szoktam hallgatni a poénjait, de tényleg főként a beszédstílusán szórakozom

Vonat

A busz pont az állomásnál tesz ki, csak 10 métert kell mennem a peronig! Mostanság nagyjából középen szoktam felszállni, ahol már látásból szintén sok embert ismerek. Annyira nem jegyzem meg a rájuk jellemző, személyes apróságokat, mert az út nagy részén olvasok. Ha meg nem, akkor az öböl hullámzó vizét nézem, ami a sínektől kb. 5 méterre morajlik. Csudajó!

* * *

Szóval ezeket minden nap tapasztalom, és ahogy ez történik, egyszerűen úgy érzem: Itt a helyem, ide tartozom. Nem csak, vagy nem pont a buszra (de oda is), hanem Új-Zélandra.

Boldog vagyok itt, pláne azóta mióta Bence, Gabi és Rebi megérkeztek (már csak Barnika hiányzik, de ő nagyon-nagyon)

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ALLTEAMS are now in beta testing with a new product the ALLSTARS Directory which will bring increased profile and new revenues to sports clubs in NZ.  Clubs can showcase their brand and facilities online which will attract new membership interest; but most importantly they can invite the local business community to support them by purchasing a listing in the directory and the businesses receive recognition for supporting the club.

Businesses get fantastic value back from the initiative by increasing their online profile with a mini website, receiving recognition for supporting the sports club they love and being top in results when club members search.

“We have been looking to deliver more value back to the loyal businesses who sponsor the club year after year – and now we can with the ALLSTARS directory” says Kevin O’Brien president of Hamilton Marist

Sports Organisations throughout the country are planning to get in behind the directory as a critical new source of revenue in the coming months; especially as traditional revenue streams such as gaming machine proceeds and public funds face severe challenges going forward.    There is fantastic marketing support for the initiative which clubs can tap in to when promoting the directory to local businesses.  Clubs can find out more information and participate by signing up on the club directory page and Businesses can sign up to support their club here.

Ministers reading picture books to schoolteachers.

Ministers blaming horrific youth unemployment on ‘some of them are only looking for paper runs‘.

Ministers deciding that league tables may be useless for schools but are perfect for hospitals.

And Ministers declaring that anyone challenging one of our last true monopolies is a Red under the bed out to destroy our freedoms.

If someone wants to wake me when we get to 2011, I’ll be inside a big bottle of gin.

This Blog is set up to inform people that there are companies and people in New Zealand that do not pay there debts.

Two examples of these are:

NZ Consumables Limited
Andrew Napier

and

G.S.E Group Limited
Harry Memelink

As we go one we will inform people about more of these companies and their Directors that do not pay their debts.

… going beyond my saturday self guided initiative … breaking the rules! Here are some monday evening delights. Lets all ignore tomorrow is Tuesday? Lets go frolicking in a German forest … perhaps take a nanna nap on a north coast  NZ pier?

Nearly the end of another school year and I feel a little more settled with a permanent job in the bag!  Knowing where I am going to be and what I am going to be doing (well, sort of!) is quite a nice feeling.   Mind you, I still haven’t received an official offer of a job in writing, although Vicky, our Principal, did announce to the rest of the staff that I had been appointed so I guess that is something!  All being well I will be at Dio for the foreseeable future teaching French part-time, part-time IT Teacher coach and Outdoor Ed co-ordinator.  An interesting portfolio and quite challenging but, hey, life is all the richer for a few challenges!  But there are still a few weeks to go of this year and they promise to be pretty busy! All those end of term/end of year things that we teachers and parents have to do – summer galas, end of term musical concerts, carol services, leavers’ ball, year 10 Camp, exam marking and reports – life is pretty hectic!

Last weekend the boys and I took part in the Round the Bridges race  – 2km for Gus and 6km for Lachlan and I.  With very little preparation due to injury and sheer laziness, it was a tough race – I hit the wall pretty early and had a stinker of a stitch – Nigel has a very unflattering video of me struggling across the finish line!  However, I still managed to come 8^th in my age group (35 – 49yrs) Lachlan did a better time, (well he has got youth on his side!) and Aonghas was disappointed that he didn’t beat his best friend ( he was 100^th of a second behind him!) but pleased that he beat last year’s time.  All in all a good day out but I am determined to a bit of training for the next one…..!

We have all joined the Hamilton Mountain Bike Club and have been going out on a Wednesday evening for Club night races.  Aonghas and Lachlan took part in the Pukete Spaghetti a few weekends ago and, as well as getting caked in mud, had a great time.  Aonghas has been at the back of the pack on the last few Wednesdays and is struggling somewhat on a bike with no suspension and dodgy gears, but he has persevered and after a particularly bumpy bit last week he said, ” Mum, my balls hurt – I might never be able to have children!”  Will have to look at getting him a new bike but he is at that awkward stage of being just too big for a child’s bike and not quite big enough for a small adult frame!  Trade-me beckons!   At least while I feel he needs me to stay with him I don’t have to go fast! I don’t want to bail and make a fool of myself – well, actually I don’t want to hurt myself, I don’t really care what people think!  Just need to get Nigel going now but he has the excuse of a broken chain on his bike…!

The garden is going well and we have started to harvest our first vegetables – Silver Beet.  There is something special about eating home-grown produce, isn’t there?  Fresh and chemical free.  The Broccoli is almost ready and there are flowers on the courgettes, beans, cucumbers and tomatoes.  The spring onions are doing well as are the leeks and carrots. There is also a selection of “plants with no names” – I planted the seeds and rather foolishly used a water soluble pen to write the labels and the writing washed off in the rain!  Well, I quite like surprises!

We are starting to make plans for the Summer holidays – we have booked to go on the Overlander – the train down to Wellington in the first week of the summer hols.  We will stay with Nigel’s Aunties and have a family get together down there and then home back home for Christmas.  We have the option to spend New Year with some friends in a beach house they have booked but we would also like to go up to Northland as we haven’t explored up there yet.  Will let you know what we decide next post!

Let me just start by saying what an amazing and impressive tour it was, so much knowledge, so much cool tech stuff, so a big thankyou to Telecom Wholesale, Chorus and Jay Best for organizing the whole thing!
Anyway for now there’s just photo’s, I’ll go back later and add some tags or comments about them when I’m not so lazy but for now I just wanted to get them online so a few close friends / family could see. Talk about a TON of cables huh?!
Pix below the break

It sounds too good to be true, flat-rate broadband in New Zealand, there has to be a catch, right? Well, here’s a summary of my experiences, which are all documented in slightly longer posts on PressF1.co.nz

Prior to switching I had one kick-ass connection with Orcon. It wasn’t super fast, I would sync at around 4m/bit. Not too bad, but not too great. I’d obtain almost max line speed each time when I ran speed tests, download tests, and any other kind of throughput test I could, with the exception being when I classified it as lower-priority traffic in my QoS.

I could honestly be downloading from several different places at once, at around 3200kbps, my wife could be on a VoIP call and browsing, I could have a torrent trickling in, and HOST games via my VPN service DotALAN, and it never missed a beat!

However when TiVo was announced, and I saw it was Telecom-only I had to investigate it.

A quick bit of background, my Boss who is also a church friend happens to live 1K down the road, closer to the actual Exchange. He sync’s at approx 14m/bit with his Orcon connection and regularly attains that on downloads both national and internationally. Wanting to see who was “better” after my parents (Who live approx 400m CLOSER to the exchange) had an absolutely terrible experience with Xnet wholesaling off Telecom, my boss signed up for the Pro plan on a second line. Long story short we setup two identical routers, one with an IP ending in .1 and the other with the IP ending in .254. Thanks to a quick batch script I whipped up we could quickly switch between the two. Long story short, the Orcon would download at about 30kbps faster (30 out of 14000-odd, so not noticable) and the Telecom one would consistently upload at about 20kbps faster (20 out of 900-odd, again you cant notice it). Both just as reliable as each other, so when it came time for me to try out Big Time, I figured I should be safe.

Prior to switching I ran speedtests (Not that I needed to, I knew my line well enough) and traceroutes to several NZ-local and Australian international websites. Aside from a small amount of packet loss on Big Time, things seemed pretty good! The packet loss has sufficiently diminished now to the  point where I can’t specifically blame it on Big Time.

Speeds are something people complain lots about, however in my experiences of Warcraft 3 (I don’t really play much else) on both Battle.NET and DotALAN (PPTP VPN) the connection was just as good as the Orcon one. They even state that they deliberately lower the priority of SSL & VPN connections, yet it’s never missed a beat!

I’ve had some issues around speeds from specific websites, such as Rapidshare / Hotfile, but I don’t really care much about that.

VoIP calls still work brilliantly. Ping times slowly degrade from around 6ms to 19ms to 2talk on my connection, depending on if it’s peak time or not, but there’s never more than 1-2ms jitter while on a call.

YouTube sucks like you wouldn’t believe Videos take *so* long to buffer it isn’t funny … well they’ve sort of improved a little in the last week (Not sure why) but it’s still sad knowing that YouTube videos don’t *need* to be that way. They never were before on my Orcon connection, nor are they for my boss on his Telecom connection, even if we rate-limit him with our own QoS.
TVNZOnDemand was another “test” streaming video site, all their videos appear to be encoded with 1-pass CBR. Im assuming that because ALL the Shortland Street (FYI – Not a fan of the show, but my wife is, hence using it for testing) videos I used as test subjects had exactly the same amount of time taken to buffer, then playback. It was 16 seconds of buffering for 7 seconds of playback. The Ads beforehand didn’t seem to obey that rule however.

Anyway, Telecom have since acknowledged they “accidentally” put TVNZOnDemand in with the Big Time Traffic Management, and are now working to remove it. This could take some time though. I don’t mind, it’s not high priority for me now they’ve fixed TiVo which also wasn’t working, but it turns out that was an issue with TiVo, independent from the Big Time traffic management. Still, with YouTube being the size it is, so much is shared via it these days, it’s a shame it’s got such a low priority. Target bittorrent users I think.

Interestingly enough, they’ve also targetted Usenet with their Traffic Management. Kind of surprised that they “know” of it but yeah basically now Usenet downloads are horribly slow, even multi-threaded, so if you do a lot of that then you’ll be disappointed.

However when all is said and done, I’ve managed to do 14+GB for 4 days solid earlier this month when I had a bit of stuff queued up, and that’s *after* my own QoS is applied so I could no doubt do more if I really tried. People have complained about it in other forums and things, gaming not working as well as it could, slow sites, but it’s hard to say to everybody: Go use OpenDNS, replace your crappy router with something nice like an NB6Plus4WN, check your sync speeds / SNR / Attenuation, fluff around with interlacing if you must, use a real browser, heck use a LiveOS as a test to see if things speed up … people just aren’t interested in “fixing” things like I am.

Big Time works for me… Thus far I’m very happy

Tra qualche giorno sarà esattamente 1 anno da quando ho rimesso piede nell’Emisfero Nord, e a volte mi capita di pensare a cosa sarebbe successo se fossi rimasta nella Terra della Lunga Nuvola Bianca… e soprattutto adesso che laggiù sta arrivando l’estate,  e dopo aver visto le foto dell’ultimo party di compleanno di Miss D, aver saputo che un mio amico andrà in Nz per due mesi e riguardando un pò di foto scattate laggiù, un pò di nostalgia di Auckland mi è venuta…

…L’altra mattina ho ricevuto inaspettatamente due emails inaspettate: la prima  dai miei ex coinquilini che non sentivo da un pò… il bimbo che avevo visto nascere ora ha 15 mesi ed è un bel giovanotto, il cane magico si è rotto una zampa, e soprattutto hanno cambiato casa…per cui la casa dei pirati non esiste più…

..la seconda email era da Miss D , che mi diceva che il nostro bar ha chiuso definitivamente i battenti…

Anche se può risultare insignificante, mi ha fatto bene ricevere queste due email, perchè mi hanno fatto capire che il micromondo che mi ero creata ( e che avevo in un certo senso idealizzato) NON esiste più…e non sarebbe più esistito anche se fossi rimasta…

Per cui ora so che tornerò in Nz (perchè ci tornerò…prima o poi) ma ben sapendo che non devo aver rimpianti…e che doveva andare così…

O forse avevo bisogno solo di  un “segno…