Category: General

Such a long time since my last update. I was kind of intimidated by the amount of work required to put the ski trip page together, so I guess I just did nothing. So, now, I’ve decided to put no page together, and just dump some photos on here, then pretend like nothing ever happened. Even the flash movies I spent hours encoding and which you can’t even see. Sorry.

Anyway. Skiing was good fun. It was super nice to have someone else drive for a change, that’s for sure.

Here are the things:

General Stuff

Whakapapa

Frozen Stream & Hardy Alpine Flora

The general stuff gallery features such exciting things as indoor climbing walls, mercer cheese, car tail lights.

The Whakapapa gallery features snow, snow, Claire, and snow.

The last gallery is a stream we found down a snow bank, the bed was completely frozen, it was really cool. The photos don’t come even remotely close to doing it justice.

I couldn’t help but enjoy the movie (Spider Man 2), even the schmaltzy bit on the train. Hated the whole justification for Ock’s arms, though… That whole fusion thing was just awful "yes, I push the ‘solar flares’ back into the sun with my hands, it’s the best way, we couldn’t possibly have just built a fucking shell made out of the material the arms are made of, don’t be fucking ridiculous, look, exactly which one of us is a pretend physicist, and who is just a small business owner?"

Also, I don’t think they should let that awful soft hack Stan Lee have any more cameos. It’s annoying, even if this time he’s kept to just a fraction of a second.

Oh, and two things that occurred to me watching the trailers for Catwoman & Hellboy. Firstly, Hellboy actually looks almost good compared to previous impressions I’d gotten, though Hellboy’s makeup doesn’t look like it could possibly be attached to anything real, it looks hollow… Entirely insubstantial. And Catwoman just looks simply awful, didn’t they learn any lessons from Batman? Big animal ears on a characters cowl look fucking stupid.

Finally, Peter should have tapped that hot (okay, gangly and a bit too skinny, but you know, she had personality) tall blonde chick, she was totally up for it. If you know what I mean.

After all my brave talk about starting to settle on a Toyota model for my next car, I just knew something had to jumble things up even further, Mitsubishi and Mazda have now come to the party. At this rate I’m going to give up and invest my money in a bus pass.

Mazda Capella (aka Mazda 626)

Pros: Very reliable, good engines. Some models are reasonably sporty.

Cons: If they haven’t been maintained properly the transmissions can give trouble.

Dual airbags, ABS, traction control on some models. They actually seem even closer to what I want than the Caldina or the Camry.

Mitsubishi Magna

Pros: The only real distinguishing factor here is the price, they don’t hold their value at all, this is great for the buyer, not so great for the seller.

Cons: ??

My last car was a Mitsubishi, and it went on strong well over 300k, but having had a Mitsi for so long, I don’t know, my experience was good, but I just can’t help but think of the last days of that car whenever I think about a Mitsi.

If I can have a convenient test drive, I guess I’ll consider them, but as it is they’re probably not going to be high on my list — but only for the frankly not very good reason I mentioned.

This is getting difficult.

A couple of things for you today, once again I took Claire to work this morning, and decided to go play in the park with George, this time I had a camera and took lots of lovely boring photos for you to endure enjoy.

The George playing in the Big King reserve photo gallery is here.

I also put together a page about a trip I took to Vanuatu many years ago (1998!), the photos are pretty crappy, and what I haven’t plain forgotten I’ve left out for fear it will incriminate me. Regardless, the Vanuatu photo gallery is here, and the rest of the Vanuatu stuff is here. (This evolved from an email I sent to a friend a couple of days ago, hence the awful horrible style.)

Poor Claire is still feeling under the weather, so I dropped her off at work this morning, then on the way home George was whining some crap about

wanting to go play with his friends, so we went up to the Big King to see who was around, just in time for the hail to start, followed closely (as you’ll know if you’re in Auckland) by squalling winds, lightning, and thunder some really nice sharp rolling thunder.

Lovely. I stood under a tree with my windblown umbrella and shivered while watching George run around playing in the rain with a collie.

Came home to find the lovely sight of hail all over the lawn, so… photos. This is about the closest we get to snow in sunny Auckland, so I have to make the most of it, I guess. Forgive my crazy thumbnail image map, I’m not sure what I was thinking.

I’m thinking about getting another car. (Claire is as well, but she wants a hot little European thing, whereas I’m more interested in a Japanese station wagon sort of thing.) So far, I’m pretty sure I’m going to get a wagon, probably an automatic — while I enjoy the extra control I get with a manual transmission, I’m sick of driving a manual in Auckland traffic — and ideally not a white car, silver or black or a dark green or blue.

Anyway, to this end I’ve been looking at a few different makes and models:

Subaru Legacy GT or Legacy 250T

Pros: Good looking. Quite high performance. All wheel drive. Crazy-good road-holding. By far the best photo of all the cars I’m discussing today. 😉

Cons: These complete pieces of shit make mechanics rub their hands with glee.

When I first started thinking about getting another car, it was the Subaru Legacy that really made me think of getting a wagon, managing to be both practical, and sporty. Which is a nice combination. A wagon makes good sense when you have a horrible little brat of a dog.

After doing a lot of reading, and talking to my mechanic, I was basically put off Subaru’s for life.

It turns out they’re incredibly expensive to maintain, and some of them are extremely unreliable, leading to endless trips to the mechanic. When your mechanic gives you advice like this, against his own best interests, you should probably take it.

It only compounded the feeling I was getting from review sites and owner forums of people crying about their fucked cars.

Toyota Camry

Pros: Exceptional build quality. Smooth engine (esp. the 3l v6). "Executive" good looks. Reliable. Comfortable.

Cons: Can be pricey. Not very sporty, handling and steering are for comfort, not precision and fun.

Toyota is pretty well known for making long-lived reliable cars, which has lead, in no small part, to their being reliably ranked amongst the most popular marques in NZ. The Toyota Camry is rated as a very smooth comfortable and quiet ride, with a lovely smooth engine. But not very exciting.

Toyota Caldina

Pros: Toyota reliability. Good looking. Some models can be quite sporty (The GT-T for example), though admittedly I’ll probably be avoiding anything with a turbo (or as David prefers "torbo").

Cons: Smaller range of options than in the Camry.

By this point, I’m starting to get really dejected, to begin with (several weeks ago) I was just thinking, "Oh yeah, I’ll just get a Subaru Legacy in the colour I prefer, and away I’ll go as a happy camper." but then reality had to kick in, and now after looking through my thousandth spec list, or user forum, or classified listing, I’m thinking about a completely different manufacturer. And now I’m all worried about how many airbags it has, and what sort of side impact protection does it have, &c.

Anyway. I quite like the looks of the Caldina’s, I haven’t test driven any yet, but I’ve had a nice up close and personal look at one, and depending on how my test drive experience works out, I’ve got a feeling there’ll either be a Camry or a Caldina in my future.

Sorry about the car talk today.

Neat, I just discovered that if you have enough whisky you hardly miss your soul at all.

Woosh, while claiming that the market is presently competitive, and that there is no need for regulators to step in, forget to mention that their product is only doing well thanks to the fact that the market can’t effectively compete because practically everyone have to get their pipes from Telecom, who take a fat cut, and that Telecom has effectively set the DSL prices for everyone with their death grip on the local loop & the southern cross cable, not in spite of this.

The boys at Woosh clearly realise that if there actually was genuine competition in the broadband market, their offering would well and truly fall by the wayside, fast flat rate DSL would fuck their crappy wireless product in the ear hole.

Also, they’ll have a much harder time of it in Wellington, I’d almost go as far as saying that they’ll get their arse handed to them. Our fair capital already has damn fine wireless — and fat-ass pipes running all over the place. It’s one of the few things I find compelling about Wellington, that and the noodles, shame about everything else in the place, especially that "museum," what a joke.

I hope they decide to do something truly innovative, they might manage to hook us if they went for a bit more speed at the same price point. As it is, I’ll stick with my ADSL.

People who actually are being cool and innovative: Wired Country. With plans available through their resellers at only around $65 per month, and speeds at about 1000kbps, this is some good looking stuff – also, unlimited national, as many people are currently enjoying on Jetstream Starter, and a reasonably generous 8 gigs of international traffic.

Big drawback: they’re not available in the city yet, and horrible leach file traders will no doubt ruin the whole thing for everyone.