A full week into the New Zealand Film Festival, I finally saw my first film. C.R.A.Z.Y. is a wonderful french film out of Canada that digs into the struggles of a somewhat-dysfunctional family growing up together. Strong images and strong language dominate the movie, making for a gripping experience. It’s no surprised that it has done well on the film circuit.

When I saw the first article spouting America’s concept of a New Middle East, I put my finger on the problem. Not the only problem, but a huge problem. It is the western contempt for the lives of those in the Arab states. For as long as Israel pushes for land and America drives its foreign agenda into the real people who have real lives in the area, there will be dissent created. Like pressure building towards an earthquake, tension is stored in the hearts and the minds of the people until a breaking point. For as long as people have memories, they will hold onto the pain of being driven out, of watching their families killed, and of a condescending father figure telling them to sit down, shut up and take their poison pill.

The New Middle East is impossible, barring genocide, and I think we’ve seen enough war crimes in the region.

A UN observation post was struck by an Israeli bomb. There have been 3 confirmed deaths, and another assumed dead, one of which is a Canadian. Harper’s reaction? He’s sure that it was an accident. The UN Secretary General isn’t so sure that it wasn’t a deliberate attack.

I don’t presume that the lives of UN observers in the area are any more or less valuable than any of the over 400 Lebanese that have already been killed since July 12th, and it seems as if the Israeli army doesn’t care about who or what their bombs are striking either. The questions seem obvious:

• Was it intentional?
• If it wasn’t intentional, was it indescriminate?
• If it was actually an accident, what measures are in place to prevent further accidents? Large scale destructive weapons should not be put in the hands of those who are accident-prone.

(Not political in any way!)

With the winter winds blowing from the south more often than not, a lot of noise is generated by the front door of the house. It seems as if the door is bowed slightly and the wind gets through at the top corner. Over the weekend, I put in some rubber weather stripping to help silence the problem, hopefully helping my flatmate to sleep a little better through the night. We haven’t had a southerly for a few days, which is almost a shock, so it has yet to be proven to work. But fingers are crossed.

It’s things like this that make me wish, sometimes, that I owned my house and I could install all sorts of insulating features. Warm houses are mmmm, mmmm good.

When considering any armed conflict, what are the facts? There are numbers: people dead, rounds fired, bombs dropped, etc. After that, everything else is subjective. As the rest of the world struggles with a reaction to the current middle east fighting, the facts are just details in the background. They don’t actually provide any useful story for what is going on. They don’t tell why anything is happening. This also means that the conclusions being drawn about who might be right or wrong are also not based on facts.

While sitting with some coworkers this morning during a coffee break, one of them said that the reason the Hezbollah are firing rockets into Israeli cities is that they lack the technology to fire guided rockets into military targets. The generalisation is that terrorists are just poorly funded armies, and that the solution to terrorism as a whole was to fund them better. I’d added that the way for terrorists to stop being terrorists is for them to win. Then they have the priviledge of rewriting the text books. In an instant, the militants have gone from being seen as terrorists to being freedom fighters. At the moment, they’re both, depending which side of the line the observer is on.

From the point of view of Israel, it’s easy to brand any actions by Hezbollah as terrorism. The added benefit is that it makes this war fully buzzword-compliant, which only bolsters the support from the Bush Empire¹. Despite the 10:1 ratio of Lebanese deaths to Israeli, there is still a painting of Israeli righteousness in the western world. Even New Zealand, which is somewhat balanced in its response, has stated that a ceasefire should be hinged on the two captured soldiers that sparked this outburst, but makes no mention of the thousands of Palestinian detainees held by Israel.

¹ This includes the regular lapdogs, which now includes Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, drawing the appropriate public criticism.

I just read The Universal Declaration of Human Rights for the first time. It’s impossible to think that the world could ever achieve a state where this basic standard is followed everywhere. We could approach a level of completeness, but never reach it. And if that sounds disappointing, consider the possibility that we’re moving backwards. On one hand, there is continuing and escalating fighting in the Middle East. On the other hand, there is the decent of western nations into police states in an effort to counter the terror boogeyman.

In the desperate search for something heartening, I ran across a call to the New Zealand government to join the UN call for a ceasefire. The whole world needs ask for peace. The alternative isn’t so pleasant.

I’ve had two trees living outside since living in Auckland. The Wellington climate is substatially different from Auckland, and with the weather that we’ve had over the previous months, I moved the palm tree from the south balcony to the more sheltered north balcony. Even there, things were looking pretty miserable. Yesterday, I finally moved them inside. Some serious culling of dead leaves was needed, but I’m hoping that both will recover quickly and fill out their bulk again.

I generally prefer the look of rooms with plants in them. Like far too many homes, our living room layout is centred on the television. The umbrella gives the room a little visual variety, both in colour and shape. Conveniently, it also happens to fit into a corner that really lacked usefulness. However, I don’t know long it will take to start spilling over the sofa. I like the look, but I don’t want it tickling the back of my neck.

Ever since I started playing around with PyBlosxom, I’ve been writing all my entries by hand. If it needed moving into the proper directory, it was done by hand. If an edit needed to be done, without modifying the timestamps of the file, same thing. I’ve been meaning to do something about it for ages.

I finally whipped up a little too, in Python, to do some of the footwork for me. All of my entries have a datestamp built into the filename. This was added when the file was moved into the directory tree. So the first instance of the tool did just that: modify the filename and move it into the category directory. The next step was to add a hook into PyTextile to provide a quick-access preview function. And finally, it was nice to have the ability to edit an entry without changing timestamps in case links move or something.

This entry is the first real-world test. If you see this, it worked.

While doing some background reading on why there is always fighting in the Middle East, I ran across a wonderful summary from the CBC. With the background in mind, follow up with some of what Matthew Good has to share. Be sure to read through the comments, too. There are very personal voices in there that take the concept of war away from something that happens on TV to something that is happening to real people with real lives.

When I was living in Auckland, I’d trid to split my keychain into house and car sets. The idea was that I didn’t want to depend on my car, and having the keys for the car separated would be a constant reminder. Leaving the car behind proved to be futile, and splitting the keychain became more of a burden than a tool.

I realised yesterday, as I was dropping off my car to get a new warrant of fitness, that I no longer need to keep my car keys on my keychain.

With the resurgence of fighting in the Middle East, fuel prices jumped again. I was a bit surprised how much time passed between the first reports of air raids and the price change, but when the change came, it was accompanied by a note:

Caltex spokeswoman Sharon Buckland said the situation in Israel and Lebanon was responsible.

“We can tie it directly to the increase in the price of Dubai crude oil, which is fuelled directly by the political and military unrest in the Middle East,” she said.

However, Mobil spokesman Peter Thornbury said the situation was much more complicated than that.

“It is a very competitive market. How much we put up the price depends on a lot of factors—we depend on New Zealand currency rates to buy crude oil priced in American dollars, and the cost of production, and the cost of supply,” he said.

The impression this gives is that the oil companies can raise the price whenever someone gets jittery, but if they don’t want to lower them when tensions resolve, there are always reasons to keep them hoisted.

The current exchange rate, against the US dollar, is listed by the National Bank. As of July 18th, 2006, there has been a 3 week trend of the NZ dollar gaining on the US dollar. Does that matter?

The Ministry of Economic Development provides a rolling report, which factors in the exchange rate changes and compares the NZ situation to those around the world. The overall effect of the exchange rate is actually quite minimal, with only slight changes in the difference between the cost of crude oil in USD vs NZD.¹ When you factor in the amount of money per litre that goes into taxes, New Zealanders aren’t paying much compared to many others. That doesn’t mean that we’re not getting screwed at the pumps, it just means that we’re getting screwed slightly less than some others.

At the end of the day, 91 Octane petrol is now at $1.769/L and I’m happy that I’m taking the bus to work every day. My monthly budget doesn’t have to account for who is trigger-happy and who’s over reacting on the other side of the planet.²

¹ I really tried to get an image of the Excel chart that shows the correlation between the difference in USD vs NZD Crude prices and the actual exchange rate, but I can’t get Excel to export the chart as an image. I don’t care enough to fight my way through it.

² Or which political/economic superpower is trying to hoist fuel prices for the sake of ever-growing profits.

When I skate in public places, I’m usually moving faster than most of the other people. As a matter of responsibility, I will keep a close eye on what I’m doing and how it affects other people, so that I’m not dangerous. However, I think it’s impossible to prevent all accidents, as yesterday proved.

The weather was very mild and the pedestrian traffic along Oriental Bay was heavy. When this happens, my skating tends to be a bit bursty; I’ll go fast when I can, but I try to leave wide spaces between myself and other people. As I was going around a little boy who was coming towards me on a bike, his eyes locked on me. His body turned with his head, oversteering so much that his training wheels were incapable of preventing him from falling. I saw the whole scenario, fully aware of how and why it was happening, but powerless to change a thing. He went over, immediately exploding in tears, alerting his mother.

I don’t know if anyone else would mark me as the cause of his accident, but I know. But at the same time, it was completely unrelated to any dangerous behviour or lack of attention to my actions. There are some things you just can’t change.

edit fixed spelling

New Zealand has some of the largest coins in the world, but that is about to change. There is a 3 month transition period between the introduction of the new coins and the withdrawl of the old coins as legal tender. This means that I have just over 3 months to get rid of my bucket of change.

I’ve been trying to spend off the small stuff for a while, counting out a dollar or so in 5¢ pieces. There are legal limits on the amount of change that must be accepted for transaction amounts, so it’s difficult (and rude) to try to get rid of them all at once. Three months should be more than enough time, but if all else fails, I can run down to my bank and deposit the rest of it into my bank account. I’d feel like a kid again, walking into a bank with pockets full of coins and a deposit slip.

Over the weekend, I celebrated my 31st birthday. The weather turned out in fine form, and with the help of a few good friends, I had a wonderful day. As an added bonus, the sunshine held out for an extra day, which led to several hours of much-needed skating to go with a couple hours of indoor volleyball yesterday.

Highlights:

• Dinner at Monsoon Poon

• Dessert at Strawberry Fare

• The girl with the amazing eyes at The Establishment

• The really creepy guy who was hitting on my friend and then bought me a shooter at Minibar

Downside:

• I almost feel bad for bringing this up, but the service at the outside bar at Dockside was abysmal. A hint for the owners/managers: We don’t care if the bartender is pretty. She should be at least somewhat competent.

For the first time in my life, I have business cards that correctly reflect my current situation. The phone number is correct. The address is correct. My name is spelled properly. I even work for the company that I think I work for. I’m just waiting for some little detail to come up and ruin things.¹

As a coincidental bonus, each of the cards is separated by blank pieces of paper. They’re the perfect size for little notes-to-self, shopping lists and bookmarks. Flashcards, anyone?

¹ I’ve intentionally left my mobile number off. It’s not used for work, and if I were to give it out to someone, I could write on the back.

This has been a horrible week for transit to and from work. I was 1.5 hours late again today due to another slip along SH2. This time, instead of attempting to get through with everyone else by brute force (which doesn’t help one bit), our bus took the long way around.

While the traffic problems are by no means the fault of anyone, I’m disappointed by the lack of notification to drivers and transit passengers. I would expect that Metlink would have service disruption notices, and if not, then maybe the individual bus companies. Neither Stagecoach nor CityLine, the two bus companies that I use to get to and from work, have any sort of status reports. The bus driver obviously knew of the detour that we were going to be taking well in advance, and even he was silent on the issue when asked by several people why the bus we were actually waiting for never showed up. Communication is a very important thing, and the transit companies are really screwing up in this regard.

Tangential to the whole issue, I’ve decided that it’s not a good idea to have a coffee while waiting for the bus in town. When bus trips extend into multiple hours, the bladder hijacks all control from the brain, and one is left in a very uncomfortable state. It’s just not worth it.

The Canadian government is providing tax breaks for transit riders who purchase monthly passes. The rebate is set at 15.5% of the cost of the pass, although I have no idea what a pass might be worth anymore. The article indicates that the increase transit ridership is expected to take 110,000 cars off of the roads nationwide.

Locally, I’m still waiting to hear the results of the transit fares consultation. Results are supposed to be released this month, with expected fare increases to go into effect in September.

Following up with the landslide yesterday, this article broadens the effects of the storms that are hitting us. And what’s next? More of the same

Tomorrow is the last day to submit comments on the proposed plans for Courtenay Place. There is some excellent discussion on WellUrban to get you in the mood.

This is what I sent in¹:

As a resident who spends a lot of time in public parks, I am in support of the plan to upgrade the space at Courtenay Place and Taranaki Street.

I find the existing space to be a bit confusing. The strip of footpath that leads to the crosswalk (crossing Taranaki St) is too narrow for its purpose, leaving pedestrians in a precarious position relative to the passing vehicles.

Furthermore, traffic searching for parking, especially after dark on weekend hours, through a predominantly pedestrian area has obvious risks. Seeing this lane moved in with Courtenay Place removes this problem entirely.

On the other hand, I have a single strong concern that I wish to see discussed. Currently, there is a request for comments open regarding transportation from Johnsonville. One of the proposals being considered is light rail service, which would extend through to Courtenay Place. Being in favour of LRT, both in general and specifically for Wellington, I would hope that execution of this plan would not limit the ability for light rail to be installed.

¹ I really should stop using the online submission forms. The tiny text box they provide is incredibly limiting and I have problems reviewing what I’ve written.

I had a marginally painful bus ride to work this morning. After my first bus was late (again), I missed the 7:20 connection and had to wait for the 7:40. It arrived at 7:55 to pick up several nervous-looking passengers. Then we realised why it was late.

Traffic on the motorway was occasionally moving. With last night’s storm, there was a small amount of hillside along the motorway that just couldn’t hang on any longer, releasing its grip and tumbling onto the motorway below. While cleanup was being done, all northbound traffic was funnelled into one of the southbound lanes, bottlenecking both directions. This left plenty of time to sit and find something to do. Read, listen to music, sleep, whatever. In the end, we reached my stop at 10:00, over 2 hours later than I normally get to work.

I haven’t found any details online yet as to when the slip occurred, or how large it was. Even though it doesn’t actually make any difference as to what my ride home will be like, I’m rather curious.

I don’t know how coincidental this could be:

• There is a tear in the knee of my track pants.

• There is a small hole in my knee pad.

• There is a not-as-small tear in the skin over my knee.

The problem is that I don’t remember landing on anything that could have been that sharp or pokey. I’m kinda confused. Floors generally don’t bite.

To the lady who left a message for me at work:

I understand that you’re very upset about the change in the packaging of your prescription medication, but I cannot help you. You see, I’m in no way affiliated with the pharmacy that you thought you were calling. I can’t explain why there was a $15 charge on pickup, either. While your message was very clear in stating that you were upset, why you were upset, and how your regular pharmacist was so much better than the new one, you failed to leave a name or phone number, so I cannot return your call and let you know that your complaint will never be heard by those who can help your situation.

I hope you are able to sort out your issues with the pharmacy. Quality of service, when dealing with daily medication, is of utmost importance.

I’d forgotten how much more battery power is drained by phone calls over text messages. Just after noon on my final day in Auckland, I was making arrangments to meet up with a friend downtown and—nothing. I couldn’t turn my phone back on, and I couldn’t find my friend. The last message I sent was to meet me on Vulcan Lane, but I couldn’t be certain than the message was delivered. I waited and looked around, and finally decided to go to the nearest Vodafone store¹ to beg for a charger for a few minutes. As soon as the phone was plugged in, I was able to get ahold of my friend, putting an end to the panic that had edged on.

As it turns out, I’d been spending a lot of time walking around with my iPod. The battery indicator on it was also edging towards silence. I managed to squeeze just enough life out to get me to work on the bus this morning, and as I type, the iPod is drinking heavily from the computer.

I remember taking road trips a few years ago where the essential items were keys, wallet and sunglasses. They were simple times, but they were good times. I am beginning to wonder if I’ll ever be able to take a weekend trip without chargers again.

¹ It was less than 500m. They have stores everywhere.

While winding out the final hours before flying back to Wellington last night, I was looking for something interesting to read. I was surprised by what I ended up with; Scientific American Mind is a goldmine. Focussing on mental activities of all types, it is semi-technical, but still accessible to people without medical or psychological backgrounds. Unlike my current list of scientific journal subscriptions, articles can easily be digested in a single sitting without leaving me drained and are much more conducive to reading on the bus without inducing motion sickness. Definitely a plus.