Home time

Vodafone had a reorganisation in the IT department and I took a redundancy package which means I am now at home, both looking for the next career opportunity, but also doing those projects at home that I have been thinking about for a while.

The first project was to create a paved area next to the driveway and a path to the steps to our front door. The front yard has been a tragic area for a while (years actually) ever since our house renovations. This has been done but the front lawn has to wait for a while as it is currently covered in builders mix for the next project... the Pizza oven.

Another teenager at home

Duncan is now 13, so all we have left at home is teenagers. Duncan assures us he is not going to turn into a non-communicative grunting teenage boy, but the signs are there already, sigh.

But we had a great day yesterday, lots of good food (went out to Nando's for lunch), and then a game of electronic Monopoly afterwards, and then homemade hamburgers and chips in the evening.

Air New Zealand Cup approaching

I am looking forward to provincial rugby, roll on Air NZ cup.

North Harbour fixtures can be found here

Partying at Mangawai

As Alison has just hit that big five oh milestone, we thought it would be good to celebrate by renting a holiday house away from Auckland and inviting a few friends around. So off we went to a great place at Mangawai heads. there we 8 of us there, me and Alison, her sister Gillian, Janet, Greg and Sharon & Kevin and Charmaine. Joan came up for a while but had to head back to look after the family.

Unfortunately for me I came down with a cold/cough on the Thursday, as we left for a long weekend on Friday lunchtime, but I was still able to enjoy the weekend even if I was a bit quieter than normal and took the occasional nana-nap.

My folks very kindly came up to look after the kids which was very nice of them, I think Megan & Duncan would have been very bored with the weekend, and Megan was suffering from the same cold she gave me.

The weekend went as expected, too much food and drink, some walks outside to work a little of it off, and plenty of good company. Altogether, very worth while.

Digital economics

Article that made sense to me how technology is fundamentally changing the basic principles of economics

NZ Beaches

I have decided that I really enjoy NZ beaches. Over last weekend (Waitangi day weekend) I spent time at a number of beaches, each of them with their own charms and pleasures.

On Friday we swam from Island bay in the Waitemata harbour around to the Chelsea sugar refinery, with a naughty jump off the mooring 'bollard' at Kauri Pt. Island bay was very plesant, but most of the swimmers won't leave thinking too much of Chelsea. Rocks covered with shells meant most swimmer came out with cuts or scrapes from the shell, luckily I got away scott free.

Fri afternoon the family took a drive up to Tauwharanui, whuch I have heard about from many people, but never been to. The kids, including Duncan's friend Cody, where well impressed as there was great surf on the beach. Many requests for a return visit.

On Sat Vic, Sue & I swam from Milford to Mairangi, and then I got to spend the rest of the day on patrol (I was covering for Russle Schoones). A great day on the beach, tons of people there (>300) with huge numbers in the water.


On Sunday I was down at Karioitahi. I am in the process of becoming an examiner in Surf Lifesaving and this was the first of 3 exams as a probationary examiner. The whole process went really smoothly and we were done by 1:00. Had a swim in the sea, leaft a geocache, and then went back to Auckland and a birthday party at Jan's house.

It was still very hot so once we left we went to Winstone's cove for a final dip. Kids really enjoyed themselves on the rope swing and are getting much better at swinging out.

What I enjoyed was the variety of beaches I was able to get to over 3 days, each of them with thier own good and bad points. Not many places in the world you could do all this.

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400m PB

Well I wasn't expecting it this morning as I had had a bit of a cold earlier in the week but I did a 400m personal best this morning.

400m freestyle in 6:14 - Yippee

I still am aiming at getting under 6:00 (fresh water, no wetsuit) at least once.

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Geocaching and SMS

Last month one of the guys at work told me about some open source software that could be used for making SMS or TXT applications. It called kannel and can act as a SMS gateway (and also a WAP proxy, but I'm not interested in that). All that was needed to get a simple SMS application going was a cell phone with a serial connection.. This was a bit of a challenge, but I got an old Nokia 6210 from Kevin and bought a serial cable off the internet and it worked.

My original though was to make an enhanced Geocache where you get a set of co-ordinates and a question, you go to the co-ords and TXT the answer to the cell phone attached to my server, e.g. if the question is "What's the colour of the letter box?", you could text back "Green". When the system receives the right answer it sends the next co-ords and question. The final co-ords would be the physical geocache.

However the main dudes at GroundSpeak, the company that runs geocaching.com the most popular geocaching web site decided they weren't going to allow this kind of cache as it was too similar to sending an email. I posted a forum topic here to try and drum up some support from the geocaching community and received some interesting feedback My takeout from the comments were:

• Most geocachers seem to be American, very few comments from Europe and other places. Maybe it's just Americans who go into the forums, other nations just do the caches.
• Quite a bit of concern about privacy, although I'm not sure people have thought it through. All I would end up with is a series of mobile numbers that have done the cache, but no info as to who holds them. I suppose I could check my logs and see when people log their visit, which means I may be able to link a mobile number to a geocahing identity, but still wouldn't see real names.
• Lots of people who dislike cell phones, possibly only when they are geocaching.
• A number of people who didn't like something new, especially if it involved technology. Quite bizarre when you consider that GPS is a really serious new technology and that Geocaching has only started since GPS capabilities have been made available outside the military in the last 10 years.

So the GroupSpeak guys haven't read the forum and come back and said, "OK you can do it", and probably won't. I may try to get a TXTCache accepted on Terracaching or Navicache.

Megan showed some interest in using this as a treasure hunt game that could be played with her friends. Could do it is a mall or shopping centre and would not use GPS co-ord to move you around. I will think about changing the programs to accommodate this.

I have also run a quiz at work that seemed to work and may use it for a fun work activity some time.

My Wiki entry on this is here

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Beautiful spring weekend

A second great weekend, the sun is shining and the weather is definately warming up. I swam yesterday at Takapuna beach and while the water is still cold, once you get going it's fine and you warm up fast once you are dressed.

Life's been a bit hectic recently. Alison was sick this week so I've been doing the cooking, and going to scouts, one or two nights a week, and I'm training the last of the rookies to be lifeguards two nights a week at the moment. I'm still swimming at 5:30 two mornings a week and going to the gym on the other days so there is not much time left for discretionary activities. But one more week to school hols and then there will be less kid related activities.

I'm off shortly for another swim with Vic, Rothsay bay to Mairangi, where there are hot showers, and then North Harbour rugby game with Duncan & Kevin at 2:30 this afternoon. So I'm in the dog box for not doing enough around the house, I'll still try and dig a drainage ditch so the proposed veggie patch does not continue to get waterlogged.

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Chocolate Bingo

Megan & I have just been to a fund raising night at the scout den, a bingo night with all the prizes being donated chocolate. It was good fun, Megan enjoyed herself even if she won't admit it. And I think the scout group made some money too.

Speaking of scouts, I'm going camping with 5 scouts in the school holidays, the WINTER school holidays, and at the moment the weather is truly shocking. I changed it from a 3 night camp to a single night so there is a limit how miserable we can get. You never know, we may get lucky.

My knees have been pretty sore lately, especially after playing volleyball. It's a tight line between 'resting' the body enough and getting out and being active which is what I like doing. One day I'll get it right.

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