Sun 22nd Dec 07, 9pm
It's my first Christmas away from home, and the feelings of guilt at deserting the folks is growing by the day.
The coming together of family is one of the pleasures of this time of year - for a couple of hours at least - while you're all excited and tearing off wrapping paper. But once you've eaten twice your body-weight in stuffing and chocolate log and slumped in a stupor in front of the telly the excitement soon wears off.
I'm sure Ma n Pa will receive sufficient visitors to keep them busy. Plus we had our unofficial Christmas Day party back in October. And I'm going to be on the webcam most of Christmas Day, crappy NZ Internet links permitting, like a fat Holly from Red Dwarf.
No doubt thousands of Kiwis away on their OEs will be feeling just the same, not least our friend Katrina the Singing Hobbit, who I'm hoping will experience a white Christmas in Europe before she returns to us in January full of stories and overdraft.
Whatever the circumstances, I hope you have a lovely Christmas and I hope 2008 is even more fun and interesting as 2007!
Thu 20th Dec 07, 10.30pm
Tonight New Zealand was shaken by its largest earthquake in 20 years, reporting at 6.8 on the richter scale at the epicenter in Gisbourne, but felt right across the country - story here.
We felt it quite strongly here in Wellington, with some alarms going off. Living in a thick concrete apartment block on top of a hill is not the most comforting place to be when the whole place suddenly lurches backwards and forwards with an alarming cracking noise.
No wonder the locals refer to it as the Shaky Isles. We're apparently due a major quake, which I hope is a wind-up. If we end up scraping for survival I don't think my IT skills are going to be much use ...
Wed 19th Dec 07, 3.15pm
I knew the weekend server move had gone too smoothly. A few days after the apparently successful relocation of 2 servers from Wellington to Auckland one of them went belly-up in spectacular fashion.
I've just spent the day as part of a major incident team trying to coax the damn thing back into life. As senior engineer people have been looking to me for answers, and I've not even had Simon "Hannibal" Appleyard, my own technical Yoda, to get sage advice from. Eek!
It started with a failed restart of the SMTP service, then a failed reboot with a corrupt SYSTEM hive. Strangely, despite the RAID controller reporting the arrays as healthy, and having run for 5 days since the move, all attempts at booting from a W2K CD via the ILO failed with Inaccessible Boot Device or STOP 7B errors.
Eventually I booted from a GParted CD and replaced the SYSTEM file with the last backup, which unfortunately was done 3 years ago during the original install! That brought the server back up mid-setup which trashed the registry altogether.
We've now booted from BartPE, got it onto the network and copied the files off it ready for a newly created web server to take over. What a mess!
So was it a coincidence things went Pete Tong just after the move, or was it linked? We'll never know. But at least I've had a semi-interesting day out of it.
Wed 19th Dec 07, 3pm
So the good news is that Peter Jackson and New Line have finally made up and agreed on how to dish out the bags of money they made with Lord Of The Rings. This now gives the green light to the making of The Hobbit, which St Peter will be Executive Producing.
So, Mr Jackson, if you're looking for short, quite rounded people living close by to act as hobbit extras ....
Mon 17th Dec 07, 8.30pm
Last week my work had a need to relocate a couple of servers from our Wellington to Auckland server rooms. When it became apparent that outage window restrictions meant we couldn't use a courier, which fool do you think volunteered to take the servers? Step forward Captain Bubblewrap!
Wellington to Auckland is 650k of bad road (by English standard anyway), like driving from London to Edinburgh just using A and B roads. The kind of trip that warps your body into a driving position you can't straighten up from for hours. A real two-packet-of-Werthers-Originals kind of trip. I LOVE trips like that!
Work hired me a decent car (a sporty Ford Falcon) and paid for a nice hotel and food, plus a few hours for loading and unloading. So on Saturday morning me and Wor Lass threw an overnight bag in the back and set off Northwards.
Unfortunately I took some bad advice from Google Maps and took State Highway 4 past Wanganui to possibly the worst stretch of road in New Zealand. The twisty, turny roads regularly suffer from what Kiwis refer to as "washout", by which they mean half the road has been eroded and not replaced. The combination of challenging roads and the sporty accelleration of the Falcon meant that by the time we got back down to the flat Wor Lass was as green as the Incredible Hulk.
In need of a toilet pronto, we turned off the road to a little sawmill town called Raetihi, right in the middle of their Christmas Parade festival. A country and western duo in check shirts and wellies were busy doing unspeakable things to Johnny Cash songs from the back of a flatbed truck across the main road. We took refuge in a local cafe where Wor Lass sat shaking for a while and taking on a Coca Cola* to ease her churning stomach.
* I've always wondered at the popularity of cola - it just tastes of fizzy chemicals to me. But to be fair it seems to cure most ailments with Wor Lass. Not surprisingly it was originally marketed as having medicinal benefits, and was rumoured to have had traces of cocaine in the original recipe.
Eventually Wor Lass started coming round and we agreed to get back on the road (I was due to meet a colleague in Auckland so was on a deadline). However, we got back to the car just as the Christmas Parade started up, blocking us in. So we stayed to watch. This is how the Parade lined up :-
- Two dozen men in kilts (or at least I hoped they were kilts, otherwise things were going to get all Deliverance very quickly) in a marching band formation, either playing bagpipes or torturing cats, I couldn't quite see for the crowd.
- Two flatbed trucks with trailers, decked out as floats, heaving with schoolchildren dressed as elves, bees and any other fancy dress costume to hand, all waving proudly.
- A ute truck with another trailer, this one carrying Santa sat astride a quad bike, waving to the kids. I suspect there was no padding or false beard involved. Beside him was a woman dressed in a half-inflated snowman outfit, also waving madly and holding a rictus smile, despite looking rather pathetic.
- The local fire truck, horn blaring and with more kids hanging out of the windows. They're obviously not having problems producing offspring around here, and undoubtedly have little else to do of an evening.
- A small minibus with just the driver on board, and no banners or decoration. Had it just turned onto the main street at the wrong time?
- Three teenage boys on scrambler bikes, burning rubber and trying to deafen the crowd, who all backed away from the roadside to avoid the toxic emissions. Wor Lass almost hurled and ran back into the cafe.
- Another bus, full size, just the driver, beeping his horn and waving.
- Half a dozen riders on horseback, dressed as cowboys.
After the horses had passed by, leaving an early Christmas present on the road behind them, the excitement subsided and people's attention returned to the makeshift stands erected in front of the local shops. You could buy a wide range of goods here, from baked biscuits to honey to ... erm ... flowers.
All this Christmas fun was played out in baking heat, which made the whole thing feel rather odd. As a new duo climbed onto the flatbed and launched into The Proclaimers' "I'm Gonna Be 500 Miles" we dived back into the car and shot out of town, dodging the newly laid roundabout.
Thankfully the rest of the trip was less eventful and the move went well. The thickly bubble-wrapped servers were in perfect health when racked up, and the hotel was excellent, particularly the room service breakfast. All in all we covered 1,400km in 2 days, which I think has my colleagues giving me some new-found if short-lived respect.
So Merry Christmas, everybody! Especially if you're reading this from the single Internet workstation in the cafe in Raetihi ...
Thu 13th Dec 07, 10pm
One of the most enjoyable aspects of being immersed in New Zealand culture is the local sense of humour. Kiwi humour is a blend of Aussie p1ss-taking and British surrealism, usually served deadpan. It took months to realise colleagues weren't being serious, and were taking great delight at reeling me in. I'm onto them now, thankfully. Well, most of the time.
The best way to sample NZ comedy is to check out the mega-successful Flight of the Conchords, currently doing the rounds on BBC4 with their 12-part HBO series set in New York. It represents Kiwi humour well and has some genuinely funny songs. I particularly enjoyed the songs Business Time - Youtube vid here - and Humans Are Dead - vid here.
They're a musical comedy duo -- no, wait, come back, they're really good, honest! They're a musical comedy duo comprising Jemaine Clement (the one that looks like Bingo from Banana Splits) and Bret McKenzie (hair to spare), though they have excellent support in the series from Rhys Darby as their hapless manager Murray.
Jemaine played the lead in the NZ film Eagle vs Shark earlier this year, also a good example of New Zealand humour.
Bret had a very minor part in the first Lord Of The Rings film -- he was an elf in the Council of Elrond scenes -- which led to internet fandom as Figwit (Frodo is good, who is that?) which brought about documentaries and a recall for The Two Towers with dialogue. As if that doesn't make him cool enough he's also an occasional keyboard player with successful Kiwi dub band The Black Seeds.
They've toured the comedy circuit for years and won awards at Edinburgh Festival, and were recently voted Wellingtonians Of The Year. (Guess where they're from).
So there's my tip-off for the biggest New Zealand export since Jonah Lomu. You know what time it is ... IT'S BUSINESS TIIIME!
My workplace is split across two buildings, the main office and server room (Harbourside), with the IT support staff separate (South Park). We lost all power to South Park this morning at 11.30am due to a wider grid outage.
The email below was sent out to all Wellington users by email - quite bizarre.
From: Reception
To: All Staff Wellington
Re: Power Outage & Liquorice Lady
Good morning,
There is currently a power outage affecting the majority of Queens Wharf except Harbourside. Having said this some of the telephones are affected due to one of our telephone nodes being in Southpark (this is also affecting calls coming to reception).
Also Liz the Liquorice lady is at reception if you wish to buy some liquorice.
Thanks,
Kara
Mon 10th Dec 07, 9.30pm
For no particular reason other than I've embraced my Inner Geek and started reading Sci-Fi mags again I've been attracted to Photoshop contests and articles detailing the casting possibilities of Star Wars.
There were some wild and fanciful castings considered, and it would have been interesting to know whether other actors could have filled the roles as well as Hamill, Ford & Fisher. Would Nick Nolte's Solo have been half as cool as Harrison Ford's? Would Jodie Foster have made that gold bikini as iconic? We'll never know, but perhaps far far away there's a universe out there ....
Blimey, I need to get out more.
Mon 10th Dec 07, 5pm
Wellington Airport.
Take one of the windiest cities in the World. Give it one of the shortest runways possible. Result: Some seriously sphincter-troubling landings. THIS is why I watch the wings during takeoff and landing....
Click here for the Youtube video.
Fri 7th Dec 07, 10pm
If you can forgive the extremely sad behaviour of browsing Mr Men sites at 10pm on a Friday, you may be pleased to know they're making a new series of the classic series - details here. They've even got Mr Noisy (Dad).
I also found a site where you can generate your own Mr Man, so obviously I had to.
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