CleverBlogName

Having mastered Teddy Bears’ Picnic, Petit Moulin, Itsy Bitsy Spider, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, the alphabet song, and that one about the turtle and the bubbles, Ada has moved on to broadening her range with classic rock and roll (Heartbreak Hotel, or the Loud Baby Song, and It Doesn’t Matter Any More), psychedlia (Uncle John’s Band), show tunes (Summertime), and punk rock (The Passenger).

…on how the Fairfax Group can save some money. Instead of outsourcing subbing to Australia, outsource writing political news to National Party PR people and fire your journalists. After all, writing like:

A high-powered government advisory group has spent the past six months debating how to fix New Zealand’s lopsided and unfair system.

…makes it clear you’re already doing the former, so you may as well get on with stop paying your reporters a salary they’re obviously no longer earning.

A land tax, of 0.1 per cent, possibly included in council rates, could cost the average homeowner $214 a year, raising more than $460 million and would be enough to fund a cut in the top personal tax rate to 30 cents in the dollar.

Yes, I can clearly see that I need more money at the expense of retirees who own their own homes. Also, I can see how it will be much fairer to shift the “tax burden” from “money I can spend” to “assets whose value I have no control over and no ability to realise an income from”.

Donuts, Espressoholic Style

Friday night was The Veils at the stupidly-named San Francisco Bathhouse, but more of that later; first I come to praise the re-opened Espressoholic and their delicious parcels of deep-fried dough.

Many moons ago I used to spend plenty of evenings in the old Espressoholic, and then I started visiting it again; shortly thereafter, it closed in a rather public fashion after the landlord refused to renew their lease. The appearance of a new cafe with the same menu and some of the same kitchen staff was NOT AT ALL SUSPICIOUS, of course; I have been waiting to see the new ‘holic re-open in Cuba Street for some time, and finally got a chance to swing by. It is largely the same place; the food is mostly the same, the prices are the same. It’s all pretty good, really. There are even some improvements: the toilets are a great deal less terrifying, for example.

There’s one delicious addition: the donuts. They’re done kind of like churros; chunks of dough deep-fried and coated with deliciousness, and served with maple syrup and marscapone. The first time I tried them I got four small ones, and on Friday I got a pair that were, as I later estimated for the folks at the Southern Cross on Saturday, about a handful each.

Ada’s first big-girl lego - a tractor.

We had a milestone on Sunday: Ada’s first real Lego. What’s especially gratifying is that the set she chose is old-school Lego; rather than being what I tend to think pejoratively of as modern Lego, with large, irreducibly fully-formed pieces, it’s a collection of small pieces that form the whole, much like the Lego I had when I was a lad. Even more pleasing is that it was in a section of similarly old-style boxed sets, alongside some dedicated collections of block types—boxes of wheels, boxes of windows, boxes of roofing tiles.

For a while Lego was beginning to look more and more like Playmobile than Lego: a castle might be made, not from acres of grey blocks, but from half a dozen large segments that snapped together. The tractor is at the other end of the spectrum; the wheels could be repurposed to a moon rover, the cab the observation deck of a spaceship, the headlight to a sports car.

(If you’re wondering why the references to spaceships, it’s because Ada was trying to build rockets with her Duplo; this provoked me to bringing out my old Lego, which I’ve build many a fine spaceship from, and knocking up a small fast spaceship, a large spaceship with swing doors that can carry cargo, and Space Truck, a mighty assemblage that, under Ada’s guidance, has evolved to carry passengers, Siku metal cars, sport cranes, grapples, and a tree; the last of these is presumably fodder for the Space Koala that sits atop the back of the large spaceship.)

Here’s the thing: for me that’s the whole point of Lego. There are no shortage of toys that give you defined, channeled play: toy cars, dolls, houses, what have you. The magic of Lego is that you can enjoy your pristine, perfect creation of an object from instructions, or you can tear it down and rebuild your own thing, learning, along the way, a little about the nature of things, about how to build strong buildings and how to avoid weak buildings, about how much better things fit together if you think about it a little ahead of time, the problem-solving of making limited resources fit elaborate schemes. The play is not just the objects, the play is the creation of the objects; child as creator and producer, not child as consumer. And that, for some time, is what it looked to me like Lego had lost in pursuit of idiot-proof, instant-gratification licensed product sets and so many of their themed products.

I’m glad there’s real Lego still being made.

That said, I still have a few reservations: I’d like to see some slightly less hideous gendering with it. I’d like to see fewer grim-and-gritty angry little Lego people, too, for that matter.

A really fascinating article on the thinking that went into turning Yucca Mountain into a nuclear waste repository. It's an interesting look at how they've throught through the challenges of building for geological time scales.

Kind of a shame it's for housing our crap instead of, say, the artifacts of our civilisation.

Koala House, Brisbane

A couple of weeks ago I got one of those little perks of having gone over to the dark side of permanent employment: I got sent over to Brisbane for an IBM-organised conference on Linux on zVM; it was an excellent three day stint; Brian Wade, in particular, was an excellent speaker: "passionate" has become one of those duckspeak terms in the business world thanks to terminal overuse, but it's actually applicable in this case. Here is a man who loves his job, loves what he does, and really enjoys sharing what he knows with the rest of us.

Mario and Susanne were both good, although they needed a few sessions to relax and look like they were enjoying themselves.

As well as the learning—now I've got a bit of time in my schedule at work I'm off to go poke into cpuhotlugd and finally(!) get around to implementing XIP—I got to co-present a paper with John Marshall, one of my BNZ colleagues. It was the first time I've done a presentation outside of small internal settings, and it was an absolute blast. John did the bulk of the work pulling the presentation together, and we make an effective presenting team. So effective, in fact, that no-one seemed to mind that we ran over time, and we got questions, applause, and more questions.

(Pity we got rejected from presenting at linuxconf this year...)

...how much I love Joan Jett?

No, really.

(Not your everyday 50 year old)