It’s travel time again. This time I’m flying up to Auckland for the weekend. I’ll leave Wellington tonight at 8:30 and get back here around 10:30 Sunday night.

There are a few reasons that I chose this weekend:

• Canada Day with some Canadian friends

• a birthday, which may or may not have a party

• and it’s been 4 months since I left, which is long enough.

While catching up with a friend online, I was asked if I’d received a few pictures he’d emailed me. They were sent to my old university email address, which I check very infrequently. While glancing through the pages of spam which collects in there, which is nearly 0 SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio), I noticed that some of the subject lines were in french. I looked through a couple of the messages out of curiosity:

Nouveau Site !
Venez découvrir notre nouvelle boutique en ligne.

Cliquez ici

and another:

Cher Client Desjardins,

Nous avons récement détécté une ou plusieurs tentatives de connection a votre compte AccèsD

Desjardins, provenant d’une 

adresse IP suspecte et nous avons des raisons de croire qu il y a eu des tentativens de

piratage qui aurait pu divulguer 

votre mot de passe.

Thanks for that. I now know a few new words:

• provenir de – to come from; to originate from

• tentative – attempt

• divulguer – to disclose

Fun stuff, but I’d still like to see the War on Terror efforts redirected to a War on Spammers. Then the world could truly be a better place.

Yesterday was the running of the Harbour City Marathon [1]. Having done next to zero proper training, it comes as no surprise that my placing was poor. I was over 20 minutes slower than in Taupo.

I think I learned a lot yesterday:

• It’s entirely possible to run a half-marathon with next to no training.

• It’s still not a good idea.

The next running of the Levene Half Marathon at Taupo is in less than two months. I’m taking a short break from running, and if training doesn’t go phenomenally well over the next month, I’m not even going to enter. While it might sound a bit defeatist, it’s likely because I was a bit defeated. Despite that, I’m actually in a decent place to pick up a proper training schedule again, and I’m quite hoping that everything goes well.

¹ Including half-marathon and 10km run/walk.

I was told this morning that my two flatmates had decided that we’re going to hire a cleaner to come in once each week. Possible reasons for this:

• We are lazy.

• We are busy.

• Our standards are higher than our capability.

• My stuffed tiger refuses to stop tearing the house apart until I promise to make him tuna fish sandwiches.

I spent a significant amount of time trying to get flights arranged for an upcoming wedding that I’m planning to attend. It’s a fair bit more expensive than my trip home last year, but I’m not flying through Los Angeles. I cannot describe how happy I am to stay away from LAX.

Is it worth about $300 to not spend 3+ hours in that airport?

Probably.

I’ve been looking for a decent photo management tool for a long time, and I’d always be drawn back to comments about F-Spot. I’ve seen the screenshots and looked at the descriptions of what it’s capable of, but every time I tried to install it at home, on my Debian testing installation, there were always dependency problems, so I’ve never been able to try it. That changed today.

I haven’t had too much time to play with it yet, but the first glances are positive. My photo library has been imported and I’ve had a quick sample of basic editing features. I’m definitely planning a longer tour through it on the weekend.

Since moving to New Zealand, I’ve noticed that some of the familiar holidays are the same, but some are different. While this is expected for things like national anniversaries, the one that keeps causing me grief is Father’s Day. In Canada, it is the 3rd Sunday in June. In New Zealand, it’s somewhere in September. This is further compounded by the false sense of security given by the fact that Mother’s day is the same day in both countries, the second Sunday in May.

I have yet to forget to call my dad on Father’s Day, but I’m sure that it’s going to happen one day. What I need to do is set up a series of overlayed calendars (Birthdays, NZ holidays, Canadian holidays, etc) or a series of remind scripts to handle all of this. Then I just need to sync all of this to my phone.

Nays first.

I was a bit worried yesterday when I noticed that the ringer on my mobile¹ wasn’t ringing. Text messages give a single beep and 3 vibrates, but there was no beep. A little testing with changing the ringing profile showed that none of the ringtones were working. However, the keypress tones were working, so I knew the speaker wasn’t dead. Then, as mysteriously as it began, the problems ended on their own. I hope this isn’t the foreshadow of things to come. I’m not impressed with current phone designs and I don’t want to have to buy a new one.

On the other hand, I’ve finally been able to successfully connect² to my phone with gammu. I’ve used the data access cable on windows before (with some of the most horrible proprietary software I’ve ever seen), but had troubles accessing the phone through linux. I don’t know what I’m doing differently, but after writing a very basic configuration file, it just works. Even better, wammu seems to be infinitely better than the windows software that came with the data cable. Wammu is a bit slow, and seems to not have an option to sync everything at once, but it works well.

There are a few bonuses that go with using gammu/wammu:

• I can save important text messages onto the computer.

• In general, message organisation is easier. Sorting, searching and deleting subsets are things that you just don’t get with the phone’s OS.

• Time synchronisation! I don’t know why Vodafone doesn’t broadcast a time sync with the GSM signal, but setting the time based on the computer’s clock is the next best thing.

• Life synchronisation. This will take a bit of extra work, but it’s possible to update phone numbers, calendar entries and todo lists. With just a bit of text manipulation, it should be easy to perform regular updates to the phone. Hurray for reminders. Punching these things into the phone using 0–9 is a real pain.

• Probably lots more, but I’m still exploring what gammu is capable of.

¹ It’s a Nokia 6100.

² I hope this wasn’t the cause of my phone’s misbehaviour.

Quite accidentally, my mobile phone was left on the shelf in my bedroom this morning. In fact, with the rush I was in, I was very lucky to have not forgotten my keys and my wallet, since I’d not checked for those before leaving the house, either. The only thing that I’d specifically remembered was my ipod. Don’t leave home without it, I guess.

This isn’t the first time I’ve left myself away from my mobile, and I’m sure it will happen again, but I get a flash of panic each time it happens. It is friday, after all. Each time it happens, the world keeps turning; I’ve still got music.

Just recently, I heard about another podcast from CBC. It’s an excerpt from the program C’est la vie, called Word of the Week. The short piece, mostly in english, discusses the use of a french in francophone culture, including several phrases provided by people being interviewed on the street.

I’ve listened to 5 of the recent episodes and I’m very impressed. The examples make learning new words and phrases very easy and can often be a bit quirky, which is like crazy glue for the mind. Quirky things tend to stick to the brain. Some of the speakers talk very fast or have rough accents, but I’m not opposed to listening a few times to catch everything they have to say. That’s the beauty of educational podcasts; you can rewind if you didn’t catch it the first time.

The news going around is that the National Party left some unpaid bills during the most recent election. The problem is that if they repay the amount owed, over $100,000, they violate the election spending limitations. To work around the problem, a bill was introduced to provide a one-off exemption to the political party, forgiving the violation. The bill was halted immediately by members of several of the small parties.

In a press release issued by the New Zealand First Party, Winston Peters suggests that the only right thing to do is to:

pay those they owe money and to then face the consequences of their actions in relation to the Broadcasting Act.

In a subsequent press release, Dr. Brasch attacked the comment:

This is quite extraordinary: a Minister of the Crown explicitly advocating breaking the law. As a matter of principle, National doesn’t deliberately break any law.

I think the issue is quite clear. The National Party has already broken the law by overspending. They just haven’t paid the bills yet. Given that they’re seeking to change the laws to make their actions legal, it is hard to deny that they are well aware of this fact.

While I was waiting for the bus after work yesterday, at the corner of Bell Road and Parkside Road, I was wondering about the changes of rules that are applied to the intersection. Within a span of 2 or 3 minutes, I witnessed three near misses. Without rapid breaking, all three of them would have been 2-car collisions.

Why would there be so many in such a short time? It’s probably because people are unable to react properly to the rule changes applied to this specific intersection. To the best of my knowledge, this is the situation:

• Traffic from Parkside Road turning onto Bell Road South has right of way, regardless of who else is waiting. Right hand rule does not apply.
• Traffic from Bell Road South turning west onto Parkside Road has no give way sign and may proceed over traffic from Bell Road, which does have a give way sign. This is against the normal use of the right hand rule.
• Traffic from Bell Road South going straight does have a give way sign and may proceed after traffic from Parkside Road has cleared.
• Traffic from the private drive, which is opposite to Parkside Road has a stop sign and goes last.

The problems seem to stem from traffic coming from Bell Road, wanting to turn right, ignoring the priority that is laid out by the signs and roadmarkings listed above. I can’t say if it happens out of ignorance or of frustration. The distinction is irrelevant, however, because the action is dangerous.

Is the flow of traffic that has right of way important enough to justify the consequences? Maybe, but if it is, there might be a safer alternative to manage flow.

We’re approaching the mid-point of 2006 and The IEEE is beginning the mid-year society membership drive. By offerring free 1/2 year memberships to a society, they hope to increase the number of paid full-year memberships. I don’t mind, because it gives a suitable period of discovery to make an honest decision. This time around, I was offered a membership to The IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology.

I’ve had a short glance around and have read a few of the online articles via Xplore. How far into history do we draw from? We have evidence of technological changes over millenia. How far into the future do we plan for? Considering our reliance on a finite fuel supply and the rate of change that we’re imposing on the world we live in, it’s hard to believe that we’re putting thought into the end of our own generation, let alone the next few.

As an engineer, I have a responsibility to complete my designs to be a benefit to society and to the world, and to minimize the negative impact, but there is another point of view to take: as a consumer, it is my responsibility to choose products for a sustainable future.