Thingomy.co.uk

I could not forego the opertunity to wish everyone a happy new year 13 hours before anyone else will have the chance.

No sod’s going to beat me to it this year.

So happy new year, I hope it’s a good one for all concerned.

I got tapped on the sholder in a mall today by what I imediatly assumed was a guranga monk or worse, I cringed as I prepared myself for what was about to come out of her mouth, and was surprised when it came out with a shetland accent.

Low and behold I knew the person…

This planet really isn’t large enough.

Question to all computer users on here (that I actually want answers to):

Has anyone ever knowingly experianced a tangable benifit from surround sound speakers? (or heard of anyone else that has)

Dispite having spent wholy too much money on creative 6.1 and 7.1 speakers, I have never actually experianced sound coming from a direction that I could actually pinpoint during either a game or film.

And before any smart arse pipes up — yes they do work and were plugged in properly.

At this point i am considering ditching them, and selling them in favour of a half decent amp and sterio speakers, given that I normally end up using them to play music anyway…

Merry Christmas to everyone listing.

We have had the BBQ out side, and are having a great time here.

It’s lovelly weather here, bordering on t-shirt weather, I definatly picked the right time of year to come out here — how’s things with you folks?

In order to delay things such that I would arrive in the right place in the right time (or so I thought) I took the excursion to the east coast with Kiwi Ex known as “East As”; anyone that knows anything about kiwi culture will understand the pisstake there.

Anyway, it left from toupo, and backtracked to to Routorua, and proceded to stop at the same hostel as I was at a few days before to pick up/drop off, then headed on up toward the edge of nowhere known as the east cape.

We were informed that the bloke we were staying with for the first night was a somewhat interesting character, and that we would be required to sing a song after dinner. The whole group of 11(including the “driver guide”) was getting on pretty good by this stage. One perticularly dirty indevidual who looked all sweet and innocent and was actually a primary school teacher from England (but is younger than me … I feel old) produced the following adaption to jingle bells (don’t read it if you are of a sensitive nature):

Anyway, the place was fantastic, smelled a little fishy, mainly because he catches and processes his own fish. It was a gunuine familly home with converted shed full of beds. The cat came in and ended up sleeping on the bottom of somones bed too.

There was a hot tub about 30 feet from the ocien, before tea we took a swim (in the ocien that is).

After a home cooked meal with fish (snapper), roast chicken, vegi stuff, and a bunch of side stuff, we started a mass singing session, involving a bunch of slightly burchered versions of old songs, sufice to say, little of it was clean.

Next day we drove up the coast a little, and ended up at the east cape lighthouse. Now the problem with this perticular lightohouse is that it’s at the top of 700 steps… after a long hard climb, the following were taken:

a quick hop round the hill and we ended up here:

it’s a working farm with a really irate farmer, but the acomodation is good, and the activities were fantastic: horse riding, through the surf, then up to the top of a hill, there were some fantastic views, and a few sore arses.

afterwards we did bone carving — tradiionally this would have been whale bone, but the back leg of a supermarket cow sufficed. We used traditional mouri dremils to carve the shape we had selected out of ancient glossy catalogs… while the tools wern’t old, the idea was, and I’m atually really proud of the result, i had a good bit of help, but a lot of the work was mine. the bloke that was advising us on how to do it made me a little nervous, he kept givign me the “you’re a natural”, “I think we’ve descovered the hidden artist in you” and “you could be doing this for a living” it was either exageration or sarcasm, and to this day I don’t know which. Though I suspect the reason that I was the only one getting it was that i was asking more questions than everyone else “ok, you want me to work that bit down… what angle? how far? what shape should it be when it’s finished? How should I hold on to it to keep it still?” this came across as me looking insecure, when it was actually just me being an engineer, and if you look at those questions, I fail to understand how anyone else managed.

Our lovelly driver/guide took it upon herself (with a GBP3 donation each of us) to cook us a meal because there wasn’t anything better available. (the next group were left to fend for themselves while thier driver had a cuppa-soup, he wasn’t much of a guide).

The next day we headed down the coast and were introduced to a 666 meter long wharf we were told that unless we jumped off the end of it we wern’t getting on the bus again. I took the sensible route and jumped from 3 feet up the ladder, it was still bloody cold.

We arrived in a small place outside a town called Gisborne. again a lovelly place, I will be doing my best to go back on the way north.We collected wesuites and then drove for another while before we got to what is known as a Rockslide. I think I mentioned this in a previus post, suffice to say it was nuts, here are some images:

The next 2 days were filled with surfing and Ray feeding — it was a good laugh though. There are no photos of surfing due to water issues, I was planning to sty dry the 3rd day and take pics, but the weather killed it.

The group really was fantastic, I suspect I have some long term friends out of them. At 2 diferent stages I left my camera with some of them and this is the result:

Further images of random stuff are given below

I have now arrived in Christchurch, I will be working on proper updates as hard as I can.

This may be a bit of a rant, but please forgive me.

These things annoy me, I may be generalizing a little much here, but it’s true.

mysp*ce is the worst of them all (and no it doesn’t deserve a capital letter despite being at the start of a paragraph) having a degree in computing, focusing mainly on how to design software, I know that they have broken pretty much every cardinal rule there is in software engineering. generally software engineers arn’t stupid, and nothing becomes a role of that nature unless it’s really important, and there are consequences to breaking it. It’s one of only 2 websites that actually raises my blood pressure during use. I’m not going to start on the details because i have managed to purge most of them from my mind.

Be*o and Faceb*ok are not as bad but are pretty poor. The trouble with the situation is that they are based around profit, and so do the following:

They force people to look at a carefully calculated amount of adverts that balances viewing volumes with people that get fed up and leave permanently;

Maintain total incompatibility with every other system available so that you have to spend dedicated time on their site. They only interoperability that any of the sites support is email notifications, this is a universal constant, and the emails are along the following lines: “funnylookingmonkeywithawig1982thesecond has sent you a new message, click here so that you can view 5 adverts while you wait to view it”

They carefully balance cost and benefit of development/repairs. When a company (especially in software) does this, they generally ignore bugs that frustrate 10% in favour of feature requests that 15% of people want. now I generally find that I only use the very basic functionality of systems like this, I rarely want animated smilies, cellphone posting (yes cellphone posting, it only ever works in America) or the ability to draw pictures of my genitalia at people.

What’s the difference between a blog post and a bulletin? I’ll tell you what: sod all, they are fundamentally identical, text posted to friends to pass a message. The only reason for separation is so that people spend more time on the site looking at adverts.

I have found one site that does vaguely work, LJ, it’s very much more cut down, although it does have some very advanced functionality, it supports a great deal of interoperability, and actually supports all 3 of the above examples of undesirables, (if you are willing to draw your genitals in paint) only they are were implemented without leaving too many bugs, and didn’t break anything them selves, If it stays out of my way it can do anything it wants, I don’t care. It’s just a little more technical and is designed as a blogging site, which to frank is all I want from a social networking site.

With only moderate expertise, LJ can be wired up to an email account such that you rarely if ever have to look at the site, and even then, it’s one page that you can save a bookmark to.

Now after reading the above one would ask (and rightly so) why I would have any interest in going near any of the above… the answer is that if you don’t play the game and sign up to them like a mug, you lose touch with people, and find it problematic to keep certain types of friends.

It’s funny that every group of people I find seem to use one of the 3, there seems to be no pattern, but if 5 people sit down in the pub, they invariably start speaking about one of the 3 and never mention the others.

The conclusion is that if I specifically (and remember that I have difficulties integrating into sacial groups as it is) want to try to make new friends I have to sign up for all 3, and spend endless amounts of time arsing around with it trying to get it to work, sifting through shitty memes and the such or I instantly get socially shunned. I don’t blame the individuals, but society for letting corps do this.

The one final gripe I have, and this is a far wider issue, passwords, If I could use the same password for all of them it would be ok, but oh no, at least one of them has odd requirements for their passwords, so because I can’t remember one site from another, I technically can’t remember my password for any of them

The only site that makes my blood boil more than mysp*ce may get mentioned later, but i’m starting to get stressed, and it’s really good for that.

Finally found internet, but I’ll have to be quick.

I’ve had so much fun in the last few days it’s really not describable.

I’ve gotten the chance to extend my stay by 2 days in one of the places, so I leave for civilisation tomorrow.

To cut a long story short, I have:

swam in the pacific (technically 4 days in a row);
gone surfing twice;
gone horse riding in the surf;
climbed to the east cape lighthouse;
watched the sunrise a few miles from the above;
done traditional mouri bone carving;
gone rock sliding (long story);
gone wine taisting;
today I go to an art gallary.

Full descriptions later.

Forgot to mention yesterday that the caves thing was in Waitomo, and i’m currently in Toupo.

Yesterday wasn’t hugely eventfully, I went out to get lunch and a cash machine, while waiting for the cash machine I was standing around a nice square in the middle of the town, and a random Chinese lass came up to me and started of a conversation, I should have known that it wasn’t going to be good seeing as it started with “you have very nice beard and mustashe where you from?” (and no there was no comma in the middle) before I know where I was she had tried to flog me some book about the philosophical background of martial arts, then bloody well tried to guranga me, I told the cow to sod off. So after that rather amusing incident, I went for a walk.

lake Toupo is the largest fresh water body in austrelasia, and was formed in an eruption several thousand years ago. there was another smaller explosion later, in roman times, and they reported that the sky turned red over europe, it has a surface area of 616 square kilometres, so we arn’t speaking a small explosion here…

anyway, the overflow is a river called the Waikato River, which at times has a flow that will fill an olimpic swimming pool in 2 seconds. there is a path that leads along it, and this is where I chose to take a walk.

There is a hot water spring a few K out of town, it forms a stream, and pours into to the river. where the 2 meet, there is an area that one can go swimming in hot water, I decided to investigate this, it actually turned out to be pretty lousy, as there is some hot water pools (note, they are hot, not warm) and a load of cold water. after swilling about there for an hour, getting both bored and sunburnt, I continued along the path up to huka falls.

Think of a fairly low waterfall, a few meters at most, with an olimpic swimming pool going over it every 2 seconds, well, it’s awesome. I stopped for a while and took a load of photos… tech stuff:

I took a panoramic, that turned out be about 8 shots wide by 3 high, I used my 17-70 at about 30mm. Unfortunately I screwed up and left it at 10MP, so used half a memory card. the exposure was crazy as there was direct sunlit white water with subtle green tones in it in the foreground and forest in shadow in the background, along with clouds and blue sky. I decided to exposure bracket it, by a little over 3 stops, taking some in the middle as well. that and the fact the water was moving, means it’s going to be really weird to put together, but if I pull it off it will be really cool.

Tomorrow I go on the “east as” trip, it should be really cool, I’ve been told that it’s the best bit that Kiwi do, so it should be nice (or sweet as, as a kiwi would say). It’s the outback of NZ, I don’t expect to get mobile coverage let alone internet while out there, so see you folks in 4 days. I believe that we sleep on random mouri families floors for much of it.