1. I moved apartments two weeks ago and I still have no internet and won’t for another week.
2. When I called Vodafone to let them know I was moving, I specifically asked whether they had any naked DSL plans.  The guy I was talking to condescendingly explained that you can’t have internet without a phone service and basically treated me like an idiot.  This was two days before vodafone publicly launched their naked DSL plans.
3. The same weekend we moved, vodafone retired the www.vodafone.co.nz APN that Stephen’s and my phone was configured to use for our prepay mobile data, and didn’t even bother to let their customers know it was being retired.  Hence we had no mobile internet for a week.
4. Vodafone charged me a dollar just to talk to their useless helpdesk staff to ask about why my mobile broadband had stopped working.  After being transferred from helpdesk to a ‘technical support’ person, all he could suggest was that maybe rebooting my phone wasn’t enough, and that I should take out the battery and sim card and restart it and then maybe it would work.  After that failed he was at a loss until I specifically suggested to him that perhaps the APN settings had changed.  After 5 minutes on hold he came back and confirmed that was the problem.
5. Vodafone apparently can’t connect our phone line without knowing the phone number of the previous tenants (we don’t know what it was).  When they discovered this, they didn’t do anything sensible like contact me and ask for the number.  Instead, they just cancelled the connection request.  They didn’t tell me about the problem until the connection date had passed and I called them …. 5 days later.
6. They asked me to call them from the line so they could find out the number.  I did so, and the helpdesk person I spoke to told me that they didn’t need my number after all, and they’d un-cancelled my request and I would be connected in four days time.
7. When I wasn’t connected in four days as promised, I called back and was told that actually, the last person was wrong and they did need the number, and could I please go home and call them from the house so they could see the number, because it apparently wasn’t in the system from last time I’d called.
8. I dutifully called them again and their system couldn’t see the number.  Guessing the number was blocked, the only thing they could suggest was that I try to call myself and see if it shows up in my caller ID.  How it could possibly show up in my phone but not in their system was something they couldn’t seem to explain.
9. They didn’t suggest to me dialling 0169 to turn off caller ID blocking – the thing which a friend suggested to me which eventually led us to find out the number.  They’re the telco, shouldn’t they know stuff like that?
10. The fact that they will almost certainly try to bill me for three weeks without phone or internet service.

Most majors cities are sited on either an excellent harbour or an easy river crossing.   Auckland isn’t called the City of Sails for nothing – our harbour is one of the best in the world.  And tsunamis only reinforce this.

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This morning I made myself breakfast.  That’s not particularly unusual, I have breakfast at home about half the time.  Today, I had bacon and eggs with tastes-like-home-made-but-isn’t tomato relish and a vanilla chai latte.  Everything was ready at the same time so I sat down to enjoy it.   At the exact second that I picked up the fork, the whole building’s fire alarms went off.

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When I was in Standard 2 at primary school we had Bible Study classes for two hours every week. The first time, a few students went away to another room and the rest of us were ushered down to sit on the mat. A very smiley woman named Mrs Brown came and perched her ample backside on one of our tiny chairs and told us stories about Jesus. I don’t remember any of the stories, but I do remember singing a song about how “Jesus is the apple of my eye, and that’s why I’m bananas for the Lord”.

Afterwards, one of my friends told me that instead of Bible Study, all I had to do was tell my mother to write a note to the teacher and I could go to “Peaceful Relations” with her instead. That night, I made my mother write the note.
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Galveston, Texas was where Hurricane Ike made landfall on the US this weekend. Galveston is just south of Houston, and was one of the places Stephen and I visited when we did a tour of Texas last year. The fact that I’ve actually been to the places that you see on the news makes this natural disaster much more real to me than previous ones.
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Some people are apparently taking this LHC thing destroying the world thing quite seriously. I’ve personally spoken to some quite intelligent people who say that of course, they don’t really think the world is going to end when the LHC is switched on, but they are worried anyway. They can’t really explain why they are worried either, just that they have somehow been imbued with the sense that this thing is risky and dangerous. Who needs Osama bin Laden when the media is that good at generating fear over nothing?
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Scott Adams is the guy who writes the Dilbert cartoons. He also has a very entertaining (and sometimes thought-provoking) blog and has written some very funny and interesting books (which I’ll write about some other time). This is just a random collection of some of his soundbites that I enjoy the most:

“If you have any trouble sounding condescending, find a Unix user to show you how it’s done.”

It’s called a "concept car" because that sounds better than "something we pulled out of our ass and hope to someday shove up yours."
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Tonight the Large Hadron Collider had a beam all the way around for the first time. Some nutjobs are apparently afraid that this might destroy the world. But someone has conveniently put up a web site to let you check: http://hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com/
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America appears to not be the only country where basic science education is lacking.   I don’t know how this could be faked, but I have a hard time believing people really are this stupid.

This video from the French version of ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ shows a guy trying to answer the following question:

Qu’est-ce qui gravite autour de la Terre?  (What revolves around the Earth?)

A La Lune (the Moon)
B Le Soleil (the Sun)
C Mars (Mars)
D Vénus (Venus)

Watch what happens when he decides to ask the audience:

"Procrastination is like masturbation, you’re only screwing yourself"  — Scott Adams