Milo, king of the jungle

 

1000th post!

Slightly Intrepid commenced with my first post on 4 January 2007 just before my return to England, and with this post reaches the mighty four digits. That's nine years of blogging. I had the initial intention it would be my travel journal, but later it broadened its focus and became less of a personal diary. There was a definite increase in the rate of posting after I retired the Very Friday Blog (2005-12) and started including those sorts of fun found posts. More recently I've not had the time or energy to write the lengthy travel reports I used to, and have focused more on shorter pieces on New Zealand history, music or film clips, Wellington photographs, and extracts from whatever book I've been reading lately.

The top 10 Slightly Intrepid posts are still a decent mix, with the clear leader remaining the highly informative and not-at-all-amateurish Cook Strait tunnel blog. Obviously there's a great untapped market for sci-fi engineering blogs out there, so I really must get round to writing that piece about a new rail tunnel connecting Waterloo in Lower Hutt with Wainuiomata and a new commuter town built on the western side of Lake Wairarapa. The other blogs on the list are a mix of film trivia (The midgets of Casablanca, the LOTR set on Miramar peninsula), London ephemera (Mr Tibbet the Putney highwayman, a Buckingham Palace visit for a royal garden party), my first and so far only visit to Portugal (Obrigado Lisboa), and random TV and gaming fare.

Slightly Intrepid top 10 blogs by date and pageviews

A Cook Strait tunnel? 16 Apr 2008

9124

The midgets of Casablanca 6 Sep 2009

2305

The mysterious Mr Tibbet 27 Apr 2009

2189

A royal garden party 9 Jul 2008

1621

Obrigado Lisboa 16 Feb 2011

1483

The Australian election under proportional represe... 8 Sep 2013

1296

A great day for flying 27 Jan 2013

1165

Later with Jools Holland: Series 38, Episode 5 5 May 2011

1048

Sim City 4 1 Jan 2010

978

TV flashback 1981 19 Oct 2013

961

The long list of post categories shows that the top five themes for blog posts have been New Zealand generally (174 posts), Wellington specifically (162), history (154), music (153) and comedy (122) - closely followed by the all-important movies tag (108 posts). The top five source countries for pageviews have been the US, UK, Germany, New Zealand and France. Total recorded pageviews across the blog currently stands at 370,577.

I don't have a firm plan for the blog, so I guess I'll just keep posting as long as it stays interesting. Probably there won't be as many posts as I put out in 2013-14, when there were an average of 17.4 posts per month. I'm a far lazier blogger than that now! As always, any blog comments or feedback on Facebook or Twitter is very welcome, and thanks for visiting. And to close, here's a sample from the remarkably small field of 'thousand'-referencing songs - sorry Vanessa Carlton, Street Chant, Patti Smith and Snooks Eaglin, the title's been snaffled by Tenpole Tudor with their April 1981 UK no.6 hit, Swords Of A Thousand Men:

Homemade Kindle cover

When I got my Kindle a couple of years ago I was too stingy to pay for the protective wallet cover thing that they tried to add-on at the time, but naturally I did want to keep my new toy safe from scuffs and scratches. The solution was to purchase a hardback school exercise book for a few dollars and to make my own nondescript, low-profile case. And it's performed the task admirably, only suffering a small defeat at the hands of a spilled glass of water - but while the exercise book was water-damaged, it kept the device inside perfectly dry.  All you need to make your own is a book that's thick enough to provide some padding above and below the e-reader, and then you hollow out the centre of the book with a craft knife. Simple! (Although I admit in the image below mine has clearly seen better days.) 

One pod got a bit carried away with their Xmas decorations

Does it have to be one or the other?

Required 60m of wrapping paper (click to enlarge) 

That chimney will come in handy this winter

100,000 views

Recently Slightly Intrepid passed 100,000 pageviews since I started blogging here in January 2007. There have been 520 posts before this one, and I've used 33 categories to divide them up. The top 10 posts according to pageviews are dominated by a silly little post that I wrote in April 2008 on a possible route for a tunnel under Cook Strait - it would appear that there's an untapped groundswell of interest in sci-fi New Zealand transport projects out there!

Top 10 blog posts by total pageviews

1. A Cook Strait tunnel? (4191 pageviews)

How about a walkway to Tasmania while you're at it?

2. The midgets of Casablanca (1279)

Cheaper to hire short people than build a big plane.

3. Obrigado Lisboa (1229)

Portuguese capital travelogue.

4. A royal garden party (1149)

Cucumber sandwiches with the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

5. A great day for flying (1062)

Flying back from the South Island, incl. plenty of traffic from Theonering.net for the Hobbit set shot.

6. Sim City 4 (994)

Building the city of Cullinane in SC4, incl. neighbourhood profiles and transit map.

7. The mysterious Mr Tibbet (917)

A slice of London local history and a mythical highwayman.

8. Later with Jools Holland (903)

Seeing Adele perform live at the BBC... and R. Kelly (bleurgh!)

9. Le Bourget Air & Space Museum (590)

Cool old planes in Paris.  Concorde and rockets too.

10. My best and worst films of 2010 (437)

Any year with Inception and Scott Pilgrim vs The World has to be a good year for movies.

Top 5 search keywords

1. Cook Strait bridge

2. Cook Strait tunnel

3. Dave Arbus (violinist who famously played on The Who's Baba O'Riley)

4. Lisboa

5. Melody Gardot (mentioned in another Jools Holland post here)

Top 5 pageviews by country

1. USA 40,163

2. UK 14,600

3. NZ 7662

4. Germany 3286

5. Australia 2413

A means of communication

 

Yesterday I took another belated step into the 21st century: I bought my first smartphone. This involved braving the mean streets of Newmarket on Boxing Day, but I reasoned that most of the seasoned bargain raiders would be out at the malls rather than in the harsh light of day (The sunlight! It burns!). This assumption proved to be correct. There were small troupes of identically-coiffed trainee Epsom Plastics swinging tiny gift bags containing overpriced trinkets purchased with their parents' money, but the consumerism on display on the optimistically named Broadway was of a distinctly relaxed tone.

The handset I purchased is a parallel imported model, the Sony Xperia P, which has a four-inch screen and a dual-core processor. It's certainly no all-rounder like the admittedly fab but considerably pricier Samsung Galaxy S3, but it will do me just fine. I've just been tinkering with the offline settings so far because there's no wifi here and I don't currently have a data contract, but there'll be plenty of time to fill it up with handy and/or silly apps in due course.  (All recommendations gratefully received, naturally). The handset was set up for German users when it came out of the box, and while I did consider adopting a Teutonic alter-ego for the telephonic environment, it was easily switched back to English.

This means my previous mobile, a Sony Ericsson Elm, lovingly referred to as my 'dumbphone' on account of its lack of whizzy connectedness, will now be put out to pasture. It has served well since I bought it at the Carphone Warehouse in Chelmsford in August 2010, and while it never impressed with its performance, it was hardly likely to given its entry-level status. Its rudimentary wifi feature certainly proved helpful on several occasions, particularly in Berlin last year when I was anxious for news of a mysterious ash cloud that was threatening to close the skies to air traffic across Europe and thereby prevent me returning home to London.  

The No vote's disingenuous referendum campaigning

So today is the national referendum on the Alternative Vote electoral system here in the UK, which is apparently only the second ever UK-wide referendum. (The other is the 1975 referendum on EC membership, which was approved by 67 percent of voters). I paused in the middle of my morning jog early this morning to pop into the local church hall to cast my vote in favour of the change. Certainly, AV isn't a great improvement over the existing First Past the Post (FPP) system, but it's better than nothing, and a Yes vote would show that reform of the political process is possible despite the innate small-c conservatism of the political establishment. However, on recent polling it seems the No campaign might emerge victorious.


This is a shame given the nature of their scare campaign against AV. There are a range of genuine complaints that can be made against AV, chief among which is that while it is still somewhat fairer than FPP elections, it still fails to produce proportional representation. The points made in the No to AV campaign brochures don't address points like that though. They are keener to focus on scurrilous and misleading rumours, coupled with a personal attack on the LibDem leader and Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg. This is hardly a case of 'play the ball, not the man'.


I received one of the No to AV campaign leaflets through my letterbox today. It was posted rather than hand-delivered, which begs the question how much did the No campaign have to spend on postage? Did every house-hold in the UK receive one of these? Every voter, even?


The cover is dominated by a picture of a furtive-looking Nick Clegg patting David Cameron's back. The strapline: 'AV would lead to more hung parliaments, backroom deals and broken promises'. While it's possible that AV would reduce the electoral penalty suffered by LibDem voters and thereby lead to more coalition governments, you'd have to have quite a cheek to suggest this when the UK's existing FPP system  delivered the exact same coalition result that they're dangling the prospect of. As for backroom deals and broken promises, those are buzzwords that can be thrown at politicians everywhere, no matter what electoral system they're elected under. It's clearly meant as an attack linking Clegg's decline in popularity since the formation of the coalition in 2010 with the AV vote.

No to AV leaflet, delivered 5 May.

Then on the reverse the leaflet outlines the six reasons the No campaign offers for voting against AV. I'll look at them one by one:


1. It will produce more coalitions. Under the AV system we would have coalitions most of the time, with Nick Clegg deciding who would be Prime Minister by cutting a deal behind closed doors after the election.


Sure, AV might lead to more coalitions. Why precisely would that be a bad thing? It's a bit rich to criticise coalitions, particularly given it's the only way the Conservatives, the leading opponents of AV, are currently in power. And the personalisation of the argument by pinning these 'evil' coalitions to Nick Clegg is clearly an attempt to tie the popularity of one politician to a far broader and unrelated constitutional issue. It is also disingenuous to suggest that AV coalition negotiations would be any less open than the current negotiations and deal-cutting that go on within the Conservatives or Labour before and after an election. 


2. It is used by only three other countries in the world - Fiji, Australia, and Papua New Guinea - and Australia wants to get rid of it.


There are two responses to this. First, so what? If AV is right for Britain, why not vote for it? And is the No campaign saying that a system used in Australia, a close ally of the UK and a nation with an enormous shared history, is by definition unsuitable for use in the UK? As Channel 4 has pointed out: 

...around half the democratic population [of the world] does use First Past The Post. What does seem worth noting however is that not one European country, apart from the UK, uses FPTP. Plus, the most popular voting system (by the number of countries in the world, rather than population) is List Proportional Representation or List PR. 

Secondly, 'Australia wants to get rid of it'?  Where's the evidence of that? Complete nonsense.

3. It allows the second or third-placed candidate to win. We would end up with third-best candidates becoming MPs.

That's one way of looking at it.  But FPP allows candidates with pluralities to win, like George Galloway in 2005 being elected MP with only 35.9 percent of the vote. AV ensures that winning candidates have to secure a majority of votes, and it does this by redistributing based on second preferences until a majority is attained. If this isn't sufficient, the count goes on to third preferences. AV simply allows more people to have a say in the outcome of an electorate contest, rather than restricting meaningful voting choice to those who support a candidate with a minimum of one vote more than their nearest opponent. And what does 'third-best' mean anyway? AV would reduce the problem of fragmented electorate contests in which the 'least worst' candidate emerges as the victor, despite achieving only a relatively small proportion of the overall votes.

4. It will cost the country £250 million, at a time when money is tight.

Money is tight, and £250 million is certainly a lot. It's also a change from the earlier No material, which stated that it would cost 'up to £250 million', which is rather different. Either way, the figure is completely made up.

5. It means that someone else's 5th preference is worth the same as your 1st preference.

This is an example of citing a hypothetically accurate worst-case scenario. This would mean that 5th preference vote would have had to go through four full distributions of preferences. This is extremely unlikely, but it also misses the point. Under AV everyone gets the opportunity to rank their voting preferences, but everyone also only gets one vote to count towards a candidate's total. The AV system would mean voters could cast their votes for the candidates or parties they actually want to win, rather than having to pretend they like a particular candidate for the sake of FPP tactical voting.

6. It will mean that supporters of the BNP and other fringe parties would decide who wins, because they will be eliminated first and then their votes could be counted again and again for other parties. That will encourage other candidates to pander to the likes of the BNP.

This is quite clever spin, although as usual it's thoroughly misleading. Every sensible person finds the BNP's policies repulsive, but supporting AV doesn't mean that somehow the toxic policies of that party or any other will somehow taint the electoral process. Parties like the BNP are fringe parties under FPP and will remain so under AV. BNP supporters would have one vote, just like everyone else, and they would need substantial support to achieve any impact on electoral outcomes - support they simply don't have. Thankfully.

Finally, the No pamphlet finishes off with a daft rallying cry:

Remember the core principle in our democracy: every person gets an equal vote and the candidate with the most votes wins. Defend equal votes by voting No on Thursday.

The traditional angle run by FPP supporters is that the system delivers strong, single-party government. Indeed, this was invoked in the leaflet's point 1 above. In shifting to the claim of equal votes, the No leaflet undermines its own argument. The basis of the 'strong government' argument is that it excuses FPP's under-representation of many political parties by citing the importance of a clear, single-party majority, even if that party lacks the support of a majority of voters. Clearly, a FPP election is far from fair. The most recent UK general election, in May 2010, showed that unfairness up front in the number of votes it took to elect each MP. It took over three times as many LibDem votes to elect an MP as it did to elect a Labour or Conservative MP, and Green votes only counted as less than an eighth of the value of those cast for the two biggest parties.

Neither side in the referendum debate have covered themselves with glory. The Yes campaign has also been guilty of misleading claims, particularly some that argue AV would revolutionise British politics and cure a huge range of perceived evils like 'safe seats'. This is also clearly not true. A step towards AV would actually be a fairly minor change, and could be accommodated easily by voters. After all, how hard is it to rank candidates in order of preference? And some seats would still be considered safe.

But if the result of today's referendum is a victory for the No campaign, it will have been won at the cost of a reasoned, informed debate, and will only serve to reinforce public perceptions that political elites are willing to manipulate and mislead public opinion to serve their own ends.

I would've thought that sticking with an out-dated and biased electoral system that rewards some parties and punishes others isn't something that British voters should be proud of. Perhaps instead they could take pride in recognising faults in the system and taking steps to fix them. AV's not perfect but it would be a step in the right direction.

Blithe as a bird

Bluey is ready for his close-up

I've now settled in and organised my new life in Wimbledon, having moved into a new flat at the start of the year.  It's been great having a place of my own, even though the boiler broke down after only a fortnight and I had to endure four days with no heating or hot water.  The apartment has the added bonus of a Sky TV connection which will last for a few more days, so I've been able to watch the cricket from New Zealand in HD, which has been a real treat - I've not seen much cricket since moving to London in 2007. 

Despite having the place to myself, it's not a totally solitary existence.  The couple I'm subletting from will be away in Australia for about six months and have left their budgie in my care.  This is quite a responsibility for someone who knows next to nothing about avians.  I've not even seen Hitchcock's The Birds, which, given the subject matter, is perhaps for the best.  

Bluey the budgie is actually a peach-faced lovebird, and I'm getting used to the mechanics of taking care of him.  He spends most of the day in his cage of course, gnawing on seeds and squeaking at his reflection in his little mirror.  As I'm at home most of the time I also try to let him out to fly around the apartment, during which time he flits between the various windows and 'chats' to other birds outside.  He also gazes lovingly at his own reflection in the large upstairs mirror, or perhaps he's just admiring the handsomeness of that fine-looking yellow fellow who's standing opposite.  

My sister, a professional vet, has provided some useful advice for novice budgie carers, but I'm still puzzled by the suggestion that his cage should be covered from dusk onwards to allow him to sleep.  Presumably the advice was written in New Zealand rather than England, where today the sun will set at 4.33pm.  It's an inexact science.  I tend to put his cover on around late evening, or if someone is using bad words on the telly that might damage his impressionable little gnat-sized brain.

He does not exhibit a complex personality, and there's not much in the way of two-way communication going on in the relationship.  I'm not sure when he's hungry, so I just presume that it's most of the time.  This has worked out so far, and on reflection it would probably suffice with most humans too.    

UK General Election: Votes per MP

The UK general election held on 6 May elected a Commons with no single party holding a majority.  The election was held under the old first past the post voting system, which favours the two largest political parties at the expense of the smaller ones.  While some newspapers have drawn attention to the disparity between the percentage of votes cast for each party and the percentage of seats that each gained, it’s also interesting to examine the number of votes cast for each MP gained.

Naturally there is a caveat.  Strictly speaking the election isn’t over yet – due to the death of a candidate, one electorate contest has been postponed until the end of May.  So the figures below will alter slightly once those votes are included. 

Here’s the numbers as they stand now, in order of votes received.  Parties receiving under 100,000 votes, aside from the Alliance, which returned one MP, have been omitted. 

UK General Election 2010: Votes cast per elected MP

Party	Votes	MPs	Votes/MP
Conservatives	10,706,647	306	34,989
Labour	8,604,358	258	33,350
Lib Dem	6,827,938	57	119,788
UKIP	917,832	0	-
BNP	563,743	0	-
Scottish National	491,386	6	81,898
Green	285,616	1	285,616
Sinn Fein	171,942	5	34,388
Dem Unionist	168,216	8	21,027
Plaid Cymru	165,394	3	55,131
SDLP	110,970	3	36,990
Ulster Unionist	102,361	0	-
Alliance	42,762	1	42,762

 

The existing system has disadvantaged far-right political parties like the BNP and UKIP, and many will not see that as a great shame, me included.  But they were the most disadvantaged by the current system, receiving 1.47 million votes without winning a single seat.  Not far behind and on the opposite end of the political spectrum are the Greens, whose widely spread but thin support base meant that all the 285,000 Green votes only elected one MP, the party’s leader Caroline Lucas.

The Conservative and Labour parties received similar levels of return on their voting turnout, electing one MP for every 33 to 34,000 votes.  (Sinn Fein achieved the same result, and the SDLP wasn’t far off).  Of the prominent minor parties, it is the SNP and the Lib Dems who have the most to be disgruntled about.  The 6.8 million Lib Dem votes were 3.4 times less effective than those cast for the Conservatives and 3.6 times less effective than those cast for Labour.  SNP votes were approximately a third as strong as those cast for the two major parties.

Obviously, under a system of proportional representation such electoral disparities would be eliminated. 

Waiting for the gift of sound and vision

Until late last year I regularly uploaded videos taken with my Sony H-1 to Youtube, to enhance the photographic record of my various travels or of life in London.  However, in December I bought a new D-SLR, and while it’s a super camera, it lacks a video function.  This hasn’t been a problem, but when I started tinkering with Movie Maker on my laptop recently it meant that I had to turn to material shot on my older camera when I was compiling videos. 

The videos I shot on the H-1 tend to be relatively short, because I preferred to retain as much memory card space as possible for still photography, and shooting videos also has a habit of depleting the camera’s batteries much more quickly than conventional photography.  This meant that in compiling my clips, most of the material is still photography, interspersed with a few video clips.  Of course, if you’ve seen my Youtube channel before, you’ve likely watched some or all of the videos before.

The process of using Vista’s Movie Maker was simple – it’s an intuitive timeline-driven interface.  It’s easy to import material to build clips, move the pieces around, and see how the clip will flow.  There are separate timelines for text captions (note to MS: it’d be nice if the formatting options were improved) and the audio soundtrack.

The latter option was particularly entertaining.  It was great fun sorting through my MP3 collection to find tracks that fitted the visual material, both in terms of length and style.  And in case you were wondering, I immediately ruled out ‘New York, New York’ as a cliché too far. 

So, without further ado, here’s my first three attempts at clip editing using Movie Maker, with links to the blog articles I wrote on each trip.  Each clip is about five minutes long.  Sure, they’re not remarkably professional, but I think they’ve turned out fairly well, and if anything makes the process of sitting through my travel photos less tedious then I’m all for it.

Syria – Oct/Nov 2008

A week exploring busy cities, Crusader castles, ancient souks, hill-top citadels, and the fantastic desert ruins of the ancient city of Palmyra

[Syria blog part 1, part 2; music: Gene Krupa & Buddy Rich – Gene’s Blues]

New York – Sept 2007

Everyone’s first visit to New York City is special, and mine was no exception.  There’s so much to cram in and the days go so quickly!  I’d go back in a second.

[New York blog; music: XTC – River of Orchids]

 

Iceland – July 2007

Call me soft, but I went in the summertime.  Iceland can’t be beat for history and scenery, not to mention a dose of the midnight sun.

[Iceland blog; music: Icelandic artist Magga Stina – In / Naturally, from 1998’s An Album on One Little Indian]

Serious computing

In an earlier posting I discussed the state of the art in the consumer electronics field in 1984.  Having explored the archives a little further in recent weeks, I’ve dug up a few more relics from the 1980s to remind us what we had to get by with a quarter of a century ago.

The August 1984 edition of Computer Input magazine (‘New Zealand’s No.1 Home Computer Magazine’) included several pages of the mainstay of such publications at the time: full printouts of game programs for readers to type into their home computers and play at home – assuming they typed it all in correctly, that is. 

These programs, and other advertisements in the magazine, remind us that at the time there were a broad variety of computers vying for market share.  One game, ‘Subhunt’ by Deane Whitmore, offered two and a half pages of ASCII text - ‘a great game for the Spectrovideo 318 or 328’, while a tuition page offered continuing lessons in machine code for the Sinclair Z80.  A full-page advert for Sinclair computers reminds readers of the political upheavals going on in New Zealand in 1984, drawing attention to the fact that its offers are ‘still at pre-devaluation prices!’  On the magazine’s back cover, a full-page advert promotes the long-dead Sega SC3000 home computer (retailing for only $399) with the tagline ‘What good is the latest technology if you can’t afford it?’

The magazine’s lead story is Martin and Faye Hall’s mostly favourable review of the new Apple II-emulating CAT computer offered by Dick Smith.  (Dick Smith was a major advertiser with Computer Input; the CAT also featured in my earlier post).  Here’s an excerpt to remind you what computer users were being offered in 1984:

The CAT is one of the latest and more impressive computers to join the Dick Smith personal computer range.  It offers to the potential buyer many enhanced facilities and features, a wide range of software, along with a capability for system expansion.  Many of the features offered are not found to the same degree in other similarly priced computer systems.

The CAT uses a 6502A microprocessor with an operating clock speed of 2MHz.  The basic computing unit comes complete with a 64K byte on-board RAM and a 32K byte ROM.  Of this ROM, 24K bytes are used to provide the user with Enhanced Microsoft BASIC language.  The CAT can be expanded up to a total of 192K bytes of RAM […]

The CAT is being marketed with its primary competitor as the Apple IIe and from our study of the CAT we found it a worthy competitor.  It should be acknowledged though, that the CAT is very much a newcomer in the computer market and still has to stand the test of time and many users.

As a computer system in its own right the CAT offers many advanced features not seen in other similarly priced computer systems.  The CAT, priced at $1295 for the basic unit, has bridged the cost gap between serious computing and pure entertainment.  It offers an impressive alternative for potential computer users who have a limited price budget, but want a serious computer not just a toy.

The specifications listings go on to recount the CAT’s ‘80 or 40 character display’ and ‘560 x 192 HI RES colour graphics with a choice of 8 colours’.  That sound?  It’s the future knocking at the door.

25 random things about me

(Cross-post from Facebook)

1. When I was 12, I went with my class to the old Auckland District Court and sat in the small public area to learn about the legal process. By coincidence the day we visited was one of the most important in the court's history. We saw the arraignment of Dominique Prieur and Alain Mafart, the two French secret agents caught in the aftermath of their despicable bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior docked in downtown Auckland.

2. I've been on TV a few times. In 1991, I was on two episodes of Mastermind, and was the second youngest competitor they'd had on. I got through to the last eight. Three years later I was on two episodes of Sale of the Century (when it had moved to TV3). I was 'carry-over champion' for one night. Won a trip to Wellington. And some placemats.

3. My alarm goes off at 6.33am on workdays: not 6.30 or 6.35, but *6.33*. I never hit 'snooze'.

4. I flew a plane before I drove a car. We went on a beginners' flight out at Ardmore Aerodrome in 6th form and I piloted a Cessna through a quick take-off and circuit back to landing.

5. I didn't actually get my driving licence until the age of 27. I'd failed my test when I was 17 and didn't try again until I was back from my first OE in Britain. And I didn't bother to sit my full licence test until I was 33.

6. Rachel Weisz, since you asked. Those eyes...

7. I don't have a middle name.

8. I've been to 31 countries, if you count New Zealand.

9. When I was little, I thought America and Australia were the same place.

10. We moved around a lot. I lived at 13 addresses before I was 13.

11. I was dux literarum of my intermediate school. That was the pinnacle of my educational career; it was all downhill from there :)

12. I've seen Goldenhorse live four times, which is the most I've seen one band play. I've seen Crowded House thrice: Auckland Town Hall in 1993, Western Springs in 1995 and the IndigO2 in London in 2007.

13. I wanted to change my name when I was about 10, but it was too expensive. I wanted the initials 'A.J.' like the cool one in Simon & Simon.

14. The Tuckers arrived in New Zealand in 1841 on the William Bryan, the first settler ship to arrive in New Plymouth. My father's ancestors, the Chilmans, were on the same ship, but they had their own cabin.

15. I lived in Wellington for seven years, and defended the weather against the depredations of snide Auckland critics for a good five or six of those years.

16. In November 2007 I visited Tyne Cot cemetery in Belgium with friends and paid my respects to my grandfather's uncle Eric Tucker, who died at Passchendaele. I think I was the first Tucker to visit.

17. While I like corresponding by email, I also enjoy writing proper letters and sending them by conventional mail. It keeps alive a connection to centuries of tradition.

18. I've been to quite a few places now, but unlike most of my friends I've never been to Melbourne. I know it's cool; I just never got around to it.

19. I'd like to write a screenplay or a novel, but I think my style of writing is more suited to non-fiction.

20. I wore the same Doc Martens boots for 11 weeks straight on my Eurobus tour of Europe in 1997.

21. Fidgeting people give me a headache. Seriously, I have to look away.

22. I played indoor netball for four or five years in Wellington but wasn't much good at it. I once scored a three-pointer from twice the distance of the shooting circle though. Wasn't actually aiming for the net at the time, but still, pretty damn cool.

23. I have over 1200 CDs. Most of them are in 13 boxes up at Bruce's farm, waiting for me to listen to them again one day.

24. My favourite movie is probably Wim Wenders' Wings Of Desire, but I've only seen it once. I worry that re-watching it might spoil the memories of seeing it at the cinema and being overwhelmed by its beauty.

25. I still have no idea what I want to be when I grow up.

The brave new world of 1984

It was rubbish growing up a geek in the 1980s.

We had the benefit of decades worth of sci-fi writing to inform us just how brilliant and shiny the future was going to be. Silver spacesuits, moon holidays and commuting by teleportation were all just around the corner - or at least we hoped so. (Some people never got over it). Former Steely Dan member Donald Fagen captured the wide-eyed anticipation of the glorious technological future in his 1982 solo track 'I.G.Y.', named after the International Geophysical Year of 1957-8, when Sputnik soared into orbit and everything seemed possible:

Standing tough under stars and stripes
We can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear
The future looks bright
On that train all graphite and glitter
Undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
Well by '76 we'll be A.O.K.

What a beautiful world this will be
What a glorious time to be free...

The trouble is, this starry eyed optimism was out of place in the 1980s when so much of the technological revolution had yet to occur. Sure, we scrambled to play Galaxian at the games arcade and fussed over our brand new plastic digital watches, but if you were a geek in the 80s and you wanted a computer, you were starved for choice. Perhaps this explains why I owned a Sinclair ZX81 - boosted to 16K of RAM. Yeah, it wasn't very good.

Recently I was searching through some of my boxes in storage and I came across a Dick Smith Electronics (NZ) 1984/85 catalogue advertising a full range of the chain's wares, which gives a good idea of the wonders on offer at the time. Clunky home computers take pride of place at the front of the catalogue, and while it's amusing to chuckle at the specifications, the most eye-opening aspect of the adverts are the prices: the Reserve Bank's inflation calculator indicates that NZ$1 in 1984 is worth NZ$2.80 now (Q4 2008). Bear that in mind...

VZ-200 Colour Computer


My schoolmate Mathew had one of these, and at the time it seemed the height of modernity. 16K of ROM and 8K of RAM - now that's a whole lotta horsepower to play with! But sarcasm aside, the VZ-200 was dirt cheap ($557 in today's money) compared to other machines of the time. And maybe DSE couldn't shift any units at the original price? It was designed to run through a TV input so no expensive monitor was required, but the main expense hit the user when they sought peripherals - witness the printer for $495 (equiv. $1386). More cost effective to hire a fellow student to write things out by hand, I would've thought. Still, look at all those lovely games on offer...

DSE CAT home computer


Now this is the business. Lovely brown 80s backdrop too. Trading on its Apple compatibility, the CAT had a 2MHz processor, 32K of ROM and 64K of RAM, expandable to a whopping 192K. Its colour graphics card could manage a 560 x 192 display, assuming you shelled out for a colour monitor to take advantage of it. (Remember, back then a lot of users made do with eye-burning green or amber screens due to the prohibitive expense of colour monitors). The price tag here is particularly wince-inducing: $1295 for the computer only is $3626 in 2008 money, and that's without an RGB monitor, which set you back another $1095 ($3066), or a green screen for $450 ($1260) if you're feeling strapped for cash. Lastly, you'll need some data storage, so don't forget the disk drive at a trifling $550 ($1540) so you can save 165K on each of your 5 1/4-inch floppy disks. And don't forget people, this is the future!

Time is on my side (and in my pencil-case)


Having mentioned the popularity of digital watches in the early 80s, it seemed a shame to leave out this page. In the 80s owners of the calculator ruler were certainly envied, but the pen watch never seemed like a good idea: surely someone would pinch it or it would get lost? And it's not as if every moment in life when you needed to know the time would coincide with the writing of a letter or school project.

But fair enough - that stopwatch is still pretty cool even now...

We ask the questions...

Courtesy of Che at Object Dart, let's play Twenty Questions (er, there's only six actually).

What were you doing ten years ago?

Living in Tooting and working my admin job at the BOA. I'd just been on a 3-week trip to Greece the month before, which was full of blue skies, warm nights and bucket-loads of pita gyros.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world:

I am actually gaining a little weight for the first time ever! This may not be a bad thing, as long as it doesn't make me lumpy. But I worry more about my teeth than my weight, what with my fondness for sugar. So: Jelly Tip flavoured icecream, chocolate Hob Nobs, a cheap Ghuznee Street Malaysian dish, white chocolate Magnums, and fish & chips from the takeaways in Kaiaua on the Firth of Thames.

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

- Sponsor New Zealand Cricket with enough funds to tell the BCCI to get stuffed and then pick Shane Bond for the national team again.

- Get new gnashers, like Bowie

- Research and write a book or a screenplay

- Do a PhD (Oxford, perhaps?); maybe history instead of politics

- Open up a branch of Wendy's in Wellington (yeah, I'm really high-brow)

Three of my habits:

- Wanting to glare viciously at people on public transport who: talk; laugh; sing; smell; open their newspaper too widely; play loud music on cruddy headphones; play loud music without headphones; talk on their mobiles for any longer than 30 seconds. And in the mornings I'm not that keen on people smiling either.

- Spending nearly as much time blogging as I spend actually doing the things I end up blogging about.

- Losing my train of...

Five jobs that I have had:

Obscure ones? Newspaper delivery boy, Toy Warehouse floor sweeper, retail badge-wearer, call-centre worker, mortgage securities loader (don't ask me, I really can't remember what it involved).

Five things to do today:

- Shine shoes vigorously

- Re-re-watch Videojug's 'How to tie a half-windsor knot' tutorial

- Reappraise floor-based storage system

- Pack for holiday

- Go to garden party at Buckingham Palace (no, seriously)

Five people I want to get to know more about:

- Liam Finn (musician)

- Eliza-Jane Barnes (musician)

- Lucy Porter (comedian)

- Michelle Gomez (actor)

- Frankie Boyle (comedian)

People to tag:

Che's already done Richard, so I'll go for Matthew, Deeknow and Andrew.

Now this is a good idea

A t-shirt for lazy monoglot types like me.

 

http://www.threadless.com/product/989/International_Translation

 

My littlest flatmate

Baby Otene, aged 3 1/2 weeks




Baby Otene (aged 5 1/2 weeks) & family