Spudooli

A Netconcepts Reunion

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:29 +1300

There was beer and lamb and BBQ and World Famous Chicken and pavlova. There was also way more kids that was usual at these events, but then we are all getting older, and kids is the way when you're older. But all the kids there were extremely well behaved, not to mention turning out like their parents. At some point they wanted the PS3 turned off so that they could watch Discovery Channel, weird geeks.

Briefly we were concerned that given the intense concentration of Auckland's best web geeks that we'd go critical or cause an LHC type black hole, but we moved slightly further apart and saved the world for destruction.

There wasn't Jason or Charlie or JHS or Jody and there wasn't a few others, for which we were sad about. But not for very long because that is the way of the geek.

The Photo
Flying 2 flags on the flag pole with the wind coming from the wrong quarter.

It's a tree

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:49 +1300

Actually, a Norfolk Pine.

New Zealand or Chinese Garlic, I ask you?

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:10 +1300

Gabba sent me down to the supermarket to buy garlic and black peppercorns. We were having Gabba's World Famous Chicken, and the pepper is actually the most important ingredient. Which kinda makes the main reason for this post somewhat less important given garlic is the main reason for this post.

Anyways, I checked in at Sunnynook Countdown on Foursquare, after creating Sunnynook Foursquare because it didn't exist and then avoiding the inevitable charity hawkers at the front door, wandering into the vegge section, looking for the garlic.

Finding said garlic I stood there with my, now completely normal, indecision on what to fricken do next. there was New Zealand grown garlic and Chinese Grown garlic. The NZ Garlic was $19.62 a kg and the Chinese garlic was $6.72 a kg. The NZ garlic was wizened and odd shaped and small and odd colors and looked as dry as an old woman's neck. The Chinese garlic was while and plump and fat and delectable looking. not only that it was prepackaged in nice little bags so easily picked up and held while I hunted the black peppercorns.

On one hand I could buy NZ made and be generally unhappy with my purchase or buy from the evil Chinese bastards (that admitedily could really do with the sale, for all I know, although it's just as likely fucking Progressive Enterprises were making way more money that the Chinese peasant farmer) and have nice plump garlic on our world famous chicken.

In the end I chose the Chinese garlic because, after all it's just bloody garlic and it was easier and give me strength I was going to have to stand in line for 15 minutes because Countdown always have precisely 25% less checkouts open that they need to anyway and after all, it's only Garlic.

The Photo
Sunset from our new house, which we've just bought, but still haven't made a mortgage payment on, so it kinda feels like we're living here for free, which makes sunsets feel all the more sweeter, which you probably can't feel from a photo, but is the first photo I've taken this year, but what do you care that this is a really long sentence, but only because I've had a good amount of wine tonight and I'm happy to write it all.

You should see where I am. NZ is just beautiful

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 17:25 +1300

Yesterday we went out to watch NAC Insurance International Rally of Whangarei, which is a round of the Asia Pacific Rally Championship.

Typically for watching a rally, it was bloody freezing cold. But the benefits of getting to parts of New Zealand that most people would never see more than makes up for the cold. I've stood in dozens of magnificent places around New Zealand, normally with my arse frozen right off, while waiting for rally cars. Photos can never capture the feelings while on a hill, looking out over a spectacular view, while trying to avoid sitting in cow shit. Magic.

The fact that there was 8km of wide smooth gravel road to be savoured on the drive back out to he main road was frosting on the cake. Nothing beats power-sliding the BMW out of corners without the wife frowning at me from the passenger seat, because she wasn't there.

The Photo
It wasn't until I got home that I realized a panoramic photo would have been the business to capture the scene. I guess you just had to be there with us to enjoy this view.

The road is Special Stage 5. The map shows you about where we where if you want to go stand there yourself for a supreme feeling of happiness and contentedness.

I figured out why I hate commuting

Thu, 28 May 2009 09:54 +1300

I’m doing it all fucking wrong, that’s why I hate commuting.

I hate commuting real bad. It’s such a waste of my life. In fact I hate it so much, that every time I’ve got a new job we’ve moved house closer. When I worked in the city, we lived in Epsom, the close part of Epsom. When I worked out at East Tamaki, we moved over to Half Moon Bay.

Then when I got a Job at Netconcepts, we were moving to Nelson, until we didn’t and moved to Browns Bay instead. Then the boss moved to the South Island on his own anyway. But that’s a rant for another day.

I’ve always tried to never live more than 10 minutes away from work for fear that the commute will waste too much of my life. So when I finally reached escape velocity and managed to move from Netconcepts to Saatchi’s in the city, along with it’s 45 minute morning commute, I really thought my life was over.

During my morning commute for the last 20+ years, I’ve listened to Radio New Zealand Morning Report and Checkpoint on the way home. It regularly makes me so angry I change channel to commercial radio, but as soon as an inane DJ or ads come over the air, I realize what a mistake I’ve made and go straight back to the soothing tones of Geoff Robinson.

But this morning, for what I think is actually the first time ever, really, I listened to music. A couple of nights ago I bought a $30 cable to plug an iPod or laptop into the car stereo. I fitted it to the car last night, breaking a bit of the dashboard in the process which will now cost a fortune to repair, bloody hell.

This morning's commute, I listened to ELO and had an epiphany, a huge, HUGE epiphany. I was actually disappointed when I got to work. I had a fucking glorious drive to work this morning. There was chair dancing from Tristram to Onewa through half a dozen ELO tracks. Over the Auckland Harbour Bridge was 5 minutes of air guitar to Mr Blue Sky. Through St Marys I was listening to the theme song to Little Big Planet and then on the Port Road, it was Café Tecuba, Volver a comenzar (whatever that means).

I walked into the office completely fizzing. I had an unbelievable feeling of happiness and expectation. Completely high on adrenaline. I can’t wait to drive home tonight. It’ll be music every morning from now on.

Don’t bring me down, Bruce, don’t bring me dow ow ow ow own.

Who would have thought so much happiness could pour out of a small green box?

The Photo
The iPod I bought for Gabba back in 2004. It feels so huge and clunky now compared to the kid's new Nanos. The photo was taken with an iPhone because I didn't bring my camera.

And I have to prepare for a meeting now, but I'll come back and add in some link to the above tonight so that it all makes sense.

A guy walked into the cubicle next to me

Wed, 13 May 2009 22:02 +1300

We've talked about urinal etiquette here before, but I've never really been sure of what the rules are around cubicle etiquette.

I was in the men's toilet at the BP gas station near the end of the Southern Motorway recently... Wait, instead of me retelling the story, here is an Instant Message copy and paste from when I regaled What the Deuce.
(2:11:07 p.m.) Dave: I walked into one cubicle and there was no toilet paper in there, so I backed out and moved to the one next door
(2:11:22 p.m.) Dave: While I was sitting there contemplating, a guy walked into the cubicle next to me, the one with no paper and sat down
(2:11:33 p.m.) Dan: ahah
(2:11:34 p.m.) Dave: Next was a huge farting and then a huge splattering sound
(2:11:43 p.m.) Dan: that's fucking great
(2:11:54 p.m.) Dave: I thought to myself man, you are so going to regret that in about 4 minutes!!

The TP in my cubicle was in one of those huge round container things screwed to the wall, so it's not as though I could discreetly pass a roll under the wall to him. I also couldn't decide if I should just wind off a couple of turns of toilet tissue and hand that to him either. I doubt a couple of turns would do the job anyway, anyway that just didn't seem right.

So, instead I did the only thing I could think of, I got out of there as fast as possible.

The Photo
In the middle of the building I now work in there is a coffee shop downstairs. I can look down 3 floors at the top of people drinking their morning coffee. The only issue is me and heights aren't really best friends. I couldn't bring myself to lean out more to get the photo I had in my mind.

The internet is backwards

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:45 +1300

Not only only is the internet backwards, it's becoming even more so every day.

I have a web server at home, you connected to it just now to download the image above. (Very) briefly, you were virtually actually inside our house. On the server I'm storing our photos (Raw and processed) and my writing, and a huge bunch of code I've written. There is a stack of legitimately purchased music (in most cases I've now purchased it multiple times on different formats, the music industry fucking owes me as far as I'm concerned). And there is a huge pile of geek data I've collected for the last 10 years.

All of this content I can fiddle with whenever I like, it belongs to me and I can publish it how I like. It was pretty simple to agree to my Terms and Conditions of use. My EULA was completely acceptable to me.

But also out on the internet, there is an increasing amount of my content. Flickr has some, Twitter, Linked In, Facebook, Google has shitloads of my stuff.

But then I read stuff like this. Thomas Hawk is also always banging on about Flickr closing people's accounts with no notice. Scoble even regularly brings up the subject. Just last week Facebook has had to do a uturn on it's terms and conditions because the hordes were revolting.

This isn't going to get any better. The "cloud" is all the rage with every startup vying to get you to upload your content to their website so that they can make money off it. But why is it that stuff that belongs to me is not actually under my control at all. Why does some kid in Silicon Valley have more power over my photos than me just because I publish to their platform?

For years, I've been thinking the internet is backwards. I've had it up to here creating yet another account on yet another website so that I can be part of the next big thing. Not to mention I have to create those accounts to protect my Global Micro-brand. But to tell you the truth, I just want all my content here, in my house, where I can use it anyway I choose without any fear what so ever of it being cut off for any reason. But I also want to share it with the world.

So, how about we turn the internet around the right way. Yeah Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Linked in can all exist, they need to, that's the where the community benefit of the internet exists, but they should get a replica of the content I want to publish there, they should not be the source.

How about someone creates a home server application that allows me to store everything I have locally, but also allows me to extend any subset of it I choose out to those sites using OpenId and their respective APIs? All the community aspects, comments, feedback, taggings, superpokes etc can be fed back to my home server so that I still have that content.

If any of those sites chops off my account, then no big deal, I've lost nothing other than access to the community. They still get to make money off me, but the price is not so high to me personally.

Microsoft Home Server and Xbox and the PS3 and NAS with smarts on-board and any number of other consumer solutions are becoming common in homes now. This isn't a bleeding edge idea useful to only people that can host a linux server at home like me.

This will give us the power back and remove Facebook and Flickr and all the bloody others from controlling our content. Surely that is what the internet is about?

The Photo
Last year (November I think) I photographed Cara and Sean's wedding. I've been dreading looking at the photos because I got the feeling when I took them I wasn't doing my best work. People (Cara and Gabba) have been nagging me to process them for months. Finally Gabba invited Sean and Cara around for a meal on Saturday which meant there was no way I was going to escape looking the photos. Thankfully they weren't as bad as I thought. Although, as above testifies, it's an almost great shot, just like the other 109 photos that were worth handing over to them.

Anyways, one of the rules about me photographing weddings, is I get dibs on one of the photos to publish on my blog forever more, controlled my me, with no other bugger capable of taking it away.

Protecting our lifestream for my loin fruit's loin fruit

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:49 +1300

My Ma has just sent me a huge bunch of diaries my maternal Grandmother kept starting in the 1950s and more or less right up until the day before she died at the end of 1993.

Here is what she wrote for Saturday August 1st, 1992 - the day Gabba and I got married

Sat 1 Aug. Davids wedding. Dad forgot his braces. I broke my pearls. Left with Rhys and Bev at 9:45. Picked up Andrews microwave at Upper Hutt. arr Stephens for lunch 12:30. Changed and got to Wellington 1-45pm. Colleen & D & Roy & Ian walking to church from Colleens hotel. Lovely sunny day. Quite a big wedding in lovely Catholic cathedral. Impressive building and afternoon tea in hall beside it. Reon and his mother there. Colleen, Janice & Bev all looked very nice. I wore my mauve felt hat and orchid spray. Dad had white rose bud. We left about 5:45 for Wanganui. Ian in the middle, home about 9:00pm. Carol wore black. BLACK!.

It's fascinating to read her perspective of events that day in 1992 and also right through the 1980s when I spent quite a lot of time with my Nana and Pop. There is day after day of boring unimportant details of what they did together and where they went and who visited them. But there is also golden moments that should and now can be remembered. It's funny to read and sad at the same time. The notebooks record an incredible commitment over more than 4 decades of recording her life almost daily.

Quite what the family is going to do with these diaries is beyond me. I guess that's one of the benefits of dysfunctional families. I can read them and pass them on and that'll likely be the last I ever see of them, I don't have to worry about it.

Those diaries got me thinking though. I'm actually doing exactly what my Gran did, recording huge amounts of what I do every day on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook and Linked In (not so much because they are representative of the backwards internet, more on that in another post) and IM and email and this blog and half a dozen other online places. But it's all electronic and not just written with a biro in an old notebook.

How am I going to protect my 4 decades of diary writing so that my kid's kids can read them with the same interest I am my grandma's? What happens when Twitter disappears. More importantly when it doesn't give me access to all my tweets*. Or Flickr closes and I lose the photos therein? When the email I have sent over the last 10 years is consumed by the company I work for? What happens in 30 years when PHP and MySQL and Linux no longer exist?

So, given I usually need a project to work on (which is why you can see how many times we have flushed our downstairs toilet), I think I'm going to code a system to store my digital lifestream into a database and maybe something almost analog (like XML) and back it all up to the cloud somewhere like Google or Amazon.

If I don't do it soon, it'll be lost forever. How will my grandkids ever find out what I thought of their wedding day if Twitter is bought by AOL and completely buggered?

The Photo
A stack of Nana's diaries, the first time her Aug 1st 1992 entry has made it to digital over analog. I could bet that the analog version will outlive this digital version. I guess that's my mission to prevent.

*Did you know that you can't currently easily view your oldest tweets past about tweet number 3200? Go back and get them now if you want them yourself before they are gone forever.

15 seconds of post-processing

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 12:51 +1300

This image probably requires some explanation.

@Surfarama sent me a link to Pixlr this arvo. I was completely gobsmacked with how fast it loaded and how simple it made post-processing images. In the time that potatoshop normally takes to open I'd already made half a dozen of the normal changes I make to an image. And then in the time it normally takes do something more complicated I'd already added a vignette and even a wasteful, done to death Tiltshift thing on an image that shouldn't have one added.

Not that I'll be replacing potatoshop anytime soon because those skills have been hard earned and I'm not going to throw them away from some 2 bit free, but cool, web app.

The Photo
About 2 years ago I took some photos for an old duck that had just crashed her car into the supermarket trolley return thing that was all bent out of shape. She'd smashed up the front of her old person's car and was crying and needed the photos for her insurance. I was standing there with my camera, so obliged.

Today I needed a photo to play with Pixlr, and I found this one laying about with nothing better to do.

Count the things you have that money can't buy

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 22:02 +1300

Ever noticed that when you make pancakes, the first one you cook is always crap? It never quite makes it to that golden and delicious state. The first pancake is either limp or rubbery and pale and pasty looking. I'm not sure why, but we always toss that one to the birds.

While doing the rounds of all the places on the Internet I have some responsibility for tonight, I happened across this post from Nelson. Although I stopped reading after the quote at the top.

Partly because the fine Martini I just mixed my attention span is small and partly because the quote got me to thinking, as is the way with Gin.

I actually am damn wealthy given all the things I have that money cannot buy. Despite the world economy turning completely to shit, I have a goodly number of things that cannot be taken from me at all, irrespective the amount I have invested in them.

Yeah my Kiwisaver account is currently losing about $300 a month, but I'm still way ahead when it comes to being a part of the best family in the world. I occasionally long for a time when I can do what ever it is the hell I want and then when Gabba and the kids go away without me for 6 days, all I bloody want is them back in the house. They are my wealth.

Which is not to say though that I wouldn't turn down a couple of million dollars in cash. Unfortunately my hitman wants actual currency before he starts work. But that's another story for another day.

Anyway, to get back to the other part of this story. The other night, we (daughters and wife) were lamenting how our first born daughter seemed to get the shitty end of the collective genes between her mother and myself, while second born daughter got away with it all. Daughter 1 suffers from a few inherited defects, mostly from me (damn my inherited genes) rather than her mother. I had to admire the little bugger when she shrugged off the whole discussion by telling us "I'm the first pancake, Dad, but we don't mind this time".

She ain't going to the birds, that's for certain!

The Photo
The full moon the other night was the largest it'll be this year. The moon was the closet to Earth it has been for some period of time I can't drag to mind right now. It was bigger last month, but I only found out after it happened. This time I was on the lookout. However, I was bloody foiled by clouds. Go get a better view of it in Australia instead. Just look at the size of that sucker.

If this entire post makes no sense to you, it's you, not me.