CleverBlogName

I’m going to miss the magic cloud of Internet that follows me around. (at least, without it costing me per kilobyte..)
_hristine

One of the little perks of my work is getting a better (read: cheaper and more capable) cellphone plan that I’ve had previously. That’s nice and all, and after much deliberation I slapped a small data plan on it. It still costs less than I’ve been spending on my old plan, but I have a shiny new capability.

Sort of.

Kiwis and Aussies will be unsurprised to learn that $10/mo gets me a pitiful 100MB of data; any international reader from the first world will most likely be slack-jawed with amazement. This is a charge rate comparable to Actrix’s rates for international traffic two decades ago; at that point Actrix at least had the excuse that as and that they were one of the first ISPs in the world they were running on what was, at the time, horrifically expensive proprietary Unix hardware and, perhaps more importantly, New Zealand’s international Internet pipe was less than a half megabit for the whole country.

But still. Two decades.

Two things rammed it home for me: LCA2010 where I got to work with a warm, comfortable, CBD-encompassing cloud of 802.11 goodness courtesy of CityLink’s event sponsorship for a week, and Christine’s comment above. In Canada, whose inhabitants consider themselves horribly mobile Internet deprived, she enjoys a 6GB/mo plan. That would cost me $600 per month at the rates I’ve got.

Putting the Queen on notice

I assume this is yet another set of buildings the NZTA are deliberately running down so the Wellington City council can pave over more of the central city, which annoys me, but it’s pretty funny seeing The Queen getting a rude letter about the state of her properties, nonetheless.

...about the Wellington City Council’s efforts to “ban liquor consumption” in the city, but then I drank half a bottle of Rabbit Ranch’s Central Otago pinot noir. It was very nice indeed, but it has rather left me a little short on the word front.

There are three points that especially bug me around this, I guess:

• As Wellingtonista notes, this will most likely be open to abuse via “discretion”. I disagree with their proposed vector for abuse—I think it’s more likely to be “drinking while young” rather than “drinking while brown”, but the net effect will be the same. Near-middle-aged-me and my near-middle-aged friends will be able to quaff our favourite allegedly classy booze at picnics while our kids run riot in the Botannical Gardens. Twenty year olds will be getting a move-along with the threat of a night in the cells for doing exactly the same thing. This is the sort of thing that stinks on principle, and also undermines the police themselves.
• As they also note, there are ample, often very broad, easily enforcable laws about being drunk and a dickhead in a public place. Of course, they’re often ignored when it comes to socially sanctioned dickheadery (gigs, sports, etc), but it’s consistent with a trend of passing stupid, overbroad laws, usually explicitly intended to be used on “the youth” instead of enforcing existing ones.
• Finally, and this is one the Wellingtonista folks don’t have a hack at, but is the one that pisses me off the most, this doesn’t restrict “drinking in public” or “drunken behaviour” in Wellington one little bit. Is Cuba Mall private? Is Courtney Place private? Nope, but the council gives boozatoriums licenses to spill their shitfaced clientele all over these public spaces. And, of course, bars are all too happy to liquor patrons up and them kick them out when they become too much of a nuisance, leaving them to harass passers-by and make work for the cops later in the evening. If the council were serious about too much booze in the central city they might be asking why I can’t walk up Cuba Mall in the morning with my daughter without having to weave through winos propped up at pubs, puffing away and abusing random passers by for their entertainment. But, of course, those establishments have funnelled cash into the right pockets, unlike the aforementioned 20-somethings, so they’re Not Part Of The Problem.

(To add to my final point: in all the time I’ve lived in Wellington, I have yet—and I know I’m tempting fate by blogging this—yet to be bothered in the central city streets by aggressive drunks in any serious way; the near-punchups I’ve had to deal with have all happened in central city bars.)

It will be interesting to see what, if any, fruits of this merger will make it into HotSpot’s open code base, or if it will all end up squirrelled away, a la JRockit.

Oystercatcher off Miramar

I was pretty pleased with this one; we went up to give Ada a promised-but-missed trip up to the Massey Memorial. On the way back to the car I managed to get an action shot of an Oystercatcher. Getting a moderately in-focus shot of a bird in flight has been a holy grail of mine for quite some time.

So, the Chromium Fedora repo has vanished. That’s… odd.

These packages have been temporarily removed, due to legal concerns with some of the included code.

I wonder what the “legal concerns” are? RHEL’s lawyers, or Something Naughty in Chromium itself?

Today in kiddie French we read Animal Farm for three year olds.

No, really.

The book was the story of le canard; le canard worked around the farm while the fat farmer lay in bed eating chocolates; le canard worked until he cried with exhaustion, at which point the other animals—la vache, les muttons, and a gaggle of others—stormed the house, threw the farmer from his bed, and chased him from the farm.

Then le canard returned to doing the work around the farm.

Probably the thing that stood out most from my first French lesson is the overloading of ça va; apparently there’s nothing it can’t do. Of course, trying to get this right in a room full of people where meaning can’t reliably be inferred as a result of the use of the rising inflection. Although that seems likely to be the least of my accent related crimes against the French language.

Peacock Costumes at the Sevens

This was easily the best Sevens costume, originality and cool-wise, I saw from the gaggles of people walking past work and our local coffee spots: Four women dressed as peacocks, with backs covered by a tail of real feathers. Nicely done, and something a bit different.

They’d also spent some time getting the noise of peacocks calling down to a fine art.

“Daddy, when you shave you look like a woman. When mans shave, they look like women.”

I guess I’ve been wearing stubble and short beards more than I realised lately.

Ada also undertook a first today; we carefully counted out sixteen dollars of fifty cent pieces from Pig[1], put them in a drawstring bag, carried them into town. From there Ada went into Unity Books and chose “The Nickle-Nackle Tree” as the very first book she bought with her own money, after first considering a number of other possibilities.

She wants to commemorate this by putting her name on the receipt and keeping it somewhere safe.

[1] Pig is, these days, generally stuffed with small change rather than delicious pretend lemon.