It’s possible to want Gaza to be free of war and mass death; to have self-determination as part of a two-state solution… at the same time as wanting the October 7th hostages to be returned to their families.

These are not exclusionary wishes and the average person would surely want both.

But even many thousands of kilometres away, in a local suburban park not visible from the road, it feels like some people don’t want both those things, just one of those things.

I do not think they are making the best case for themselves.

There’s plenty of room around town for both statements to be made separately. Putting one over top of the other is at best a statement of exclusion and at worst one of erasure.

If that is their real message then I think I have received it.

Another calm sunny winter day (after some truly rubbish weather earlier in the week), so off to the top of the nearest hill for me.

Now migrating my old blog postings across to another platform (to here!) for I think the sixth time in over 20 years. I’m not 100% sure why I bother, although I do like looking at my old nature pictures in context and hopefully I can do more of that.

My old opinions have matured less well and somehow there are fewer of those kinds coming across with each migration. It’s the same thing, maybe self-preservation? that makes me set my Mastodon postings to self-destruct after a month. I don’t know everything, and with each year some certainties are eroded and new ones formed (but generally: fewer than before).

Also I am increasingly uncomfortable with my words, insignificant though they are, being grist for some dark capitalist mill I have no control over.

I do not know how to resolve this.

You know what? These last 12 months or so haven’t been great for lots of people, and while we’ve been spared the worst we still want to look out for something good to hold on to.

The rest of the family have always wanted a dog.

Now I love dogs, but after growing up on a farm I was certain that I would not want to restrict any dog of ours to the narrow horizons and confined behaviours of town and our less-than-large section in the suburbs. Our place is unfenced, and we also have chickens to look after.

And then there’s all the work to train and amuse and feed and exercise and toilet and keep healthy; the cost to us and the planet; the logistics of moving it about town with us and finding places for it on holiday (or pet-friendly places to stay). It all seemed too much…

…but I lost that battle…

…and now my whataboutisms melt when faced with this little creature:

This is Éibhneas (a lovely Scottish Gaelic name meaning “Joy”) who we could call “Eve-ness” to approximate the correct pronunciation but who we just call “Evie”.

Today I’ve been working from home and Evie is bored. She’s been playing with her toys but what she really wants is for me to stop with all the zoom calls and endless mechanical keyboard clacks of fury and play with her instead. That look on her face… is hard to resist.

She’s a 14 week-old Tibetan Terrier, and for extra goodness her sister Pipi lives with R.’s sister’s family on the other side of town. So… in theory we can help each other out with dogsitting / holidays but in practice we have found the two girls just playfight all day long and it is impossible to work from home with the two of them in the house.

She’s been with us for about a month or so and yeah, she’s changed up things quite a lot in our household. It’s taking a bit of getting used to! While nowhere near as disruptive to a settled existence as a new infant human there’s definitely some similarities.

But I guess soon things will settle down (sooner than with an infant human I’m hoping) and we’ll find a new normal with our most recent family member.

In the meantime she brings the cute. Lots and lots of it.

Well, that was interesting, but something we would not want to repeat; here’s hoping.

Spring rolled around again, as it does, and well, what to do but yet another gratuitous photo?

Yesterday R₂ and I went for a walk around the neighbourhood; there were lots of kōwhai flowering and the inevitable tūī:

Then this morning: my usual Sunday breakfast of white clover honey smeared thickly on our home-baked toast and washed down with a Chemex full of finest filter.

I am grateful to be here.

Previous springtimes:

• 27 September 2019
• 27 September 2018
• 19 September 2017
• 2 October 2016
• 27 September 2015
• 27 September 2014
• 22 September 2013
• 16 September 2012
• 25 September 2011
• 22 September 2010
• 4 September 2009
• 21 September 2008
• 22 September 2007
• 10 September 2006
• 11 September 2005
• 29 September 2004
• 2 October 2003
• 22 September 2002

With the government over the last weekend unveiling a new four-stage pandemic alert scale, and declaring we were on level 2, both R. & my places of work told us to start working from home for the foreseeable future.

So on Monday morning we started, with a renewed sense of being fortunate for what we have and being able to work through this and not suffer the uncertainty that so many others are carrying right now. In the 7am dark we went for a walk to get some small exercise and simulate the morning commute. We worked, not quite as normal, on the dining table: four screens and two laptops, keyboards, and mouses.

We established variants on the in-office rituals: R. starting a Zoom conference so that she and her colleagues could continue doing the newspaper quiz each morning; me and my workmates making a coffee and stepping outside into the sun for a FaceTime chat.

But then in early afternoon, it all changed again. The government made a new announcement: that we’d be going to level 3 for two days then level 4 from Wednesday at 11:59pm. Wherever you were on Wednesday night was where you were going to stay, in lockdown, for at least 28 days.

We hit the Air New Zealand website but we were too late to get B₂ on a flight back from Dunedin; they were all booked solid. She seemed ok with this and so did we seem to be. There was not a lot else R. and I could do in any case: it would not have been wise to send her to her grandparents on the farm an hour and a half away from Dunedin.

The next few days passed, busy with work and adjusting to this new normal. We would walk out before work, and again in the evening to end the working day: a 1.4km circuit where we would occasionally come across other people doing the same, and of course giving them all a 2m space (a lot easier now that the cars on the road had dwindled to almost nothing). The meme whereby people were to put teddy bears into their windows overlooking the street for the kids to spot seemed to be everywhere, and here and there Girl Guide troop members had chalked the pavements outside their homes with messages of support and encouragement.

B₂ and us decided that we weren’t that OK with being apart after all, but luckily for us on Wednesday the government announced an extension to the domestic travel rules allowing non-essential travel on internal flights, for people getting home, until Friday. We got B₂ on a very early direct flight from Dunedin, the better to avoid transiting a third airport and hopefully a quieter time. I bent the rules a little and went and picked her up; I felt that getting her in person, especially if she came to our car outside the terminal, was in total less risky both for us and the wider public than making her get a cab from the airport.

R. and I relaxed a little. The weekend rolled around, none too soon. Early school holidays started for R₂. With B₂ back our family was together again and she started doing some of her Uni work remotely. The weather packed up with the first vicious southerly of autumn and we had to put the fire on. We all helped build our remote island getaway.

On Sunday I went to the supermarket, which was a slightly weird experience. I picked one that had a large covered car park and sure enough, I could wait under cover from the rain, with 2m gaps between people in the queue marked with red tape. It was good to see the trolleys being cleaned between uses. I noticed that more people were starting to use masks and other protective gear; a very few were in N95 respirators and one cautious person was in surgical gear: hairnet, mask, goggles, and disposable outer overalls. I began to feel slightly under dressed; hopefully my new facemask will arrive in the coming week. (Yes, I know they are not considered essential by many authorities on the matter. But they also help prevent an infected person from spreading the virus, so from that point of view I don’t see them as useless.)

Overall this feels doable - at least for us in our lucky bubble. I don’t know if we will feel the same way after a month… but for now the pace of life has slowed dramatically in one sense while also becoming more anxious and frantic in another (limiting news intake is helpful here). The city is so quiet now and the traffic is gone; the birdsong seems more intense and when the sun shines, which earlier in the week it was almost continuously, we seem to have stumbled across great fortune.

We will need to hold onto this feeling in the days to come.

We get to select a new flag for New Zealand via two referenda: one later this year to select the best alternative; then a run-off referendum next year between this best alternative, and the current flag.

The government panel has come up with a list of 40 to consider out of the tens of thousands of designs submitted by the public. This will be whittled down to four by mid-September apparently, but how they do this is something of a mystery.

Yes, there are lots of criticisms of the process that could be made. But I’ve never liked our current flag and maybe this is a once in a generation chance to fix it. And now that the opposition parties, who up until now were supporters of a flag change, have lined up against it maybe we won’t get another crack at this for a very long time.

I guess the dispiriting thing for me is that I dislike almost all of the 40 shortlisted designs. Too many ferns (dead white trees); too many stars (boringly common aspirational marker for flags); too many koru (swirly whirly things).

Some designs provide an easily consumable and reusable brand-NZ logo (which is what our single-mindedly corporate Prime Minister prefers, it seems); while others mix some or all of these elements into a feel-good salad of signifiers.

There are a small handful on the shortlist that are composed of simple, strong geometric shapes that tell a story and these are the ones that appeal to me the most.

My favourite among these is Wā Kāinga, a very elegant but striking design consisting of three identically sized but differently coloured triangles arranged on a white field. (Here it is, animated.)

I love the concept behind this flag. The official blurb says:

The white diagonal shape is representative of the Maihi (Māori meeting house). Symbolic of the coming together of all three influences Maori, Colonial past, multicultural future. The red triangle represents our Māori heritage. The use of red, black and white references Tino Rangatiratanga. The blue triangle represents our British heritage, bordering a white diagonal line symbolising the Union Jack. The black triangle is offering up strength and optimism in a national context as well as being symbolic of our mountainous landscape.

It’s also an extremely easy flag to draw and looks good at big and small sizes. However, I’m not 100% convinced about those shades of red and blue - I think they’re both a little too bright. When I played around with this I used the blue colour from current NZ flag, and as close as I could get to the red colour in the Tino Rangatiratanga flag. Both of these colours could be lightened up a bit without being as bright as the designed version.

The other interesting thing is that the Māori colours are on the left, which to me is a subtle nod to who was here first. Nice!

I find the shape of this flag intriguing. While the designers have put it into a handy, easy to use 2:3 proportioned rectangle, there is another, slightly narrower proportion for this flag that would likely be more preferable to obsessives everywhere.

The obsessive geometry bit

So, with our optimum flag variant I assume that each of the three triangles is right-angled with two equal-length sides extending from that right angle (i.e., an isosceles triangle). Then, I imagine that the white stripe also has (invisible) isosceles triangles placed at each end. Result: MOAR SYMMETRY! My eyes are immediately soothed.

You could diagram this like so:

If you do that, and get a pencil and paper and break out your exceedingly rusty 4th form algebra, you can work out what z is. Having spent the better part of an entire evening on it I can tell you z is this:

And while I was scribbling on bits of paper, I also worked out what the proportions of our “optimum” flag would be, which is this:

Or, expressed in decimals, a rather inconvenient—for-flag-manufacturers ratio of approximately 1:1.546918160678.

But. MOAR SYMMETRY!

But to continue…

Fun though this has been to work out I suspect the designers purposely went for the 2:3 proportioned variant to make it easier to draw and manufacture. 2:3 is not an unusual flag proportion (87 countries’ flags are 2:3), whereas only a couple other countries have flag proportions that are irrational.

But I think people may also prefer a longer flag more in keeping with our current flag’s 1:2 proportions. I tried a few other variants to see how this would look, while keeping the basic structure of three identical triangles intact.

5:8, which 5 countries use, is super easy to make up in a vector drawing program. Not only am I missing those nicely symmetrical ends to the white stripe already, but it seems to me like the white stripe is almost little too thin:

This is probably as about as wide as the design will go.

And, at 1:2 (the second most common flag proportion) the white stripe is obviously too narrow:

Horrible. To fix it, the black triangle would need to be made smaller, thus breaking one of the nice design features of the flag. So, yeah, nah.

Well, this is probably all a bit academic. No doubt, unless there’s a sustained campaign for this flag, we’ll end up with one of the Kyle Lockwood fern and stars variants (which I hope are not actually copyrighted by him - how would that work for a national flag?).

It could be worse. But it could be so much better.

After each Webstock I return with the idea that I should be doing something better; starting of course with writing up my experiences there. It doesn’t happen (with my passive phrasing right there pretty much symptomatic).

This year I won a free ticket, which was very nice indeed. I resolved that because of this I should really really make the effort this year to write it up. Unfortunately good intentions didn’t really result in an epic write-up for each talk. I got partway through this and gave up.

Scott Berkun

The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com & The Future of Work

First up was Scott Berkun. I had not heard of him before. He’s spent a year working for famous blog software company Wordpress, and was asking the question: what value does Management have when all the creative challenges belong to the workers?

Good question, if you are in a narrow range of jobs for which that applies. The answer sounded like: workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your trousers!

You see, I get a feeling of dissonance about the whole pants-free thing. I don’t know about you, but when I think of pants I think of trousers and underpants. So pants-free working therefore implies some pretty horrific mental imagery when thinking about others taking up the practice, as well as a frisson of danger when applied to oneself (after all, laptops can get quite hot).

And sadly (as in, I am a very sad person) I haven’t quite yet put down my pitchfork after that time in 2005 when Matt Mullenweg stuffed the Wordpress site full of spam links for money. So I had a slightly unfair and cynical take on his talk. I started writing some random phrases down and they came out like a haiku:

Trousers optional
For privileged screen jockeys
Then blog ping chat skype

Well, I thought, that worked out quite good. I might do that again!

Josh Clark

Mind the Gap: Designing in the Space Between Devices

I should have heard of Josh Clark. I would have had I done any due diligence on the speakers. My bad: I’ve been busy. He seemed like a really nice chap though.

His issue was that our gadgets just don’t work together too well. Which is true; but the film of cynicism on my glasses had carried over from the last speaker and I couldn’t help feeling like this was a classic First World Problem.

It brings us sadness
Our gadgets don’t kōrero.
Bodge up with more tech!

A First World Problem that of course, people will make billions of dollars from.

Erika Hall

Beyond Measure

Aha! A speaker I had heard of - I knew that she is part of the same design firm as last year’s quite good speaker (but not really the star of the after-party) Mike Monteiro. Her talk was pretty cool: we have lots of data; we think it explains everything… but it doesn’t.

Meaning is tricky.
Stories have power. Data
Explains partially.

I was struck with the thought that we seem to have replaced our reliance on reductionist approaches to explaining the world with the opposite: a big-data statistical prediction of it. Neither tell human stories.

Aarron Walter

Connected UX

This chap came from MailChimp, which seems like another nice internet company. Carrying echoes of the other speakers he spoke of “designing for emotion”, and turning data into information into knowledge into wisdom. All good stuff.

Stories for business
Connect those points, cross those streams
Work your interns hard

Yeah, he lost me right when he mentioned his fantastic intern looking at 10,000 customer emails in a week, a performance that Got Him That Job! I wondered if he was a paid intern. I hoped so. And I hoped like hell that that unpaid intern cultural thing does not make it to New Zealand.

Dan Saffer

Designing with Details At my current place of work we’re building an app, so I was pretty interested in what Dan had to say.

Little things matter
Imbue feeling, quality
Humanise your work

This was the most conventionally useful talk for me. I’m now waiting for his book to arrive.

Liza Kindred

The Future of Commerce

Shopping is awesome
The revolution will be
Live on Kickstarter

I was not a fan of this talk at all - but others seemed to get more out of it.

Nelly Ben Hayoun

Crafting the impossible

Ben Hayoun was an incredibly charming French person who seems to have blagged her way into the most amazing jobs. Once again, it’s clear that talent gets you part way there; but self-confidence and risk-taking will take you to the end.

Discover futures
Extreme experiences
Hammer ooh la la

I have this feeling that she’d make the most amazing star of a documentary. But given that she had instructed that no recording be made of her talk I am guessing that it probably won’t happen.

Jen Bekman

Stick around and fix it - there’s no video of this one either.

Made Art a habit.
Business blew up. Held through with
Doge and the Right Thing.

Persist and fix your mistakes. This was an interesting contrast to a later talk about the value of quitting.

Anne-Helen Petersen

What we talk about when we talk about Brangelina

Through celebrity
Ideologies battle.
Mindfully read it.

I really liked this talk despite the apparently frothy title. Now, when stuck in the doctor’s waiting room, you can parse that stack of Women’s Weeklys in front of you. It’s OK.

Peterson has been popping up everywhere lately, even at my favourite magazine, The Baffler. This is great.

Jessica Hagy

New Zealanders explain the Internet

“…fleas of deception…”
“…you were never just yourself…”
“…culture is about you…”

Charlie Todd

Causing a Scene

In public spaces
People will be creative
Let them have a crack

Andy Baio

The Indiepocalypse

Keep Portland weird, by
Staying independent. It’s
Easy when famous.

Yeah, yeah. We can all be sustainably living indie techno-hipsters. But it helps if you’ve been struck by the lightning of techno-fame already, I thought.

Tom Loosemore

Institutions: An internet survival guide

Fixing government.
Civil Servants attending
Are envy-swooning.

A very genial chap whose talk was eagerly attended by the many government web people in the audience.

Spoek Mathambo

Internet Culture and the South African Electronic Music Scene

When the artists own
Their means of production then
A scene will explode

Later that evening he put on a pretty storming set as DJ. And you should really check out his version of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control.

Liz Danzico

The Fringe Benefits of quitting

Your project can change
Flexibility trumps plans
It’s ok to quit

Hannah Donovan

Sometimes You Need to Draw Animals

I was looking forward to this - I had heard of her before in a number of connections; most recently as a friend and collaborator of my favourite comic book duo, Gillen & McKelvie.

Yes, you keep making
Care for your abilities
Diversity good

Maciej Ceglowski

Our Comrade the Electron

This is going on
Your permanent record. You
Did this to yourself.

I think of this talk as We’re all going to die (pt. I).

Ceglowski is a wonderful writer. You should check out his blog right now.

Sha Hwang

The Future Happens So Much

Sha Hwang attended Webstock last year; this year he spoke at it! One Of Us.

Ask: are you building
Infrastructures for new crimes?
This is the System.

And this talk is We’re all going to die (pt. II).

This and the previous talk were my two favourites and reflected the slightly more down zeitgeist of Webstock lately. We have designed a monster, maybe by accident, but perhaps we can fix it.

Or not.

Paula Scher

All design is social

A voice of wisdom.
Taking the long perspective:
Be optimistic

Clive Thompson

The new literacies

Cheap ubiquity
Leads to weird usage. Then you
Use to talk to you.

Derek Sivers

The Meaning of Life

In a clown costume.
It’s as good as anyone’s,
This life’s meaning.

I didn’t really get this one.

Lame summation

So that was Webstock 2014. There’s always too much to think about at these events - which is no bad thing - but it does mean that a summary will never do it justice.

If there was one thing which this and recently past Webstocks have hammered home is that we have to be a bit more conscious of our actions as technologists. We’ve built great things, but also some very anti-human things too.

So THINK.

After the passing of the mower, a tiny clump of grass emerged with ends frayed but still standing proud.

He stopped and knelt. A memory, and an identification. It looked like a small tussock.

Flood recall:

… afternoons of lying on his back sheltered between them and staring at the sky. Sounds of wind soughing through and the occasional skylark.

… their giant cousins, the snowgrasses, that when unburnt were taller than people. Playing hide and seek between them. Getting the four-wheeler at speed bellied on them.

… their dry smell. Cool air. Windburn. Long days in the sun.

He missed them. But here they were, more scattered through the lawn as he looked.

Maybe they’d come to bring him home.

It’s Awesome August in Wellington. Though we are in the depths of winter, there’s usually quite a bit going on: the Film Festival, for example, and in latter years the rather good Wellington on a Plate festival. We don’t typically overdo either event, choosing only the one or two most interesting looking things from each.

For this year’s food choice, we went for Cooking Over Fire, The Argentine Way, to be held at El Matador, a new “Café, Asador Grill & Bar” as yet unfinished at the time I made the booking (ever the risk-taker!).

Asador is the Argentine national dish, a way of slow-cooking whole animals over an open fire. This is supposed to result in a beautifully tender and juicy meat, with hints of smoke. The idea with the event was to show us how to setup and start barbequing a lamb in the morning, and then come back and eat it in the evening.

This sounded totally outstanding, so I decided to make a day of it and bail from work. That’s how R. and I, having dropped the kids off at school, ended up wandering along Cuba Street at 9am on a Monday morning.

Remember the old Münchener Burger just up from Logan Brown? No, me not so much either. It looked so dark and uninviting and I hadn’t ever been in there in 20 years of living in Wellington. That’s where El Matador now is; the interior has been gutted and extended, a false ceiling removed to make the place a bit airier and the walls stripped back to the old white with blue trim tilework left from when the place was a butchery back in the 1970s.

There, along with 10 or so others, we met local restauranteur Mike Marsland (who used to own Ernesto, and is brother of Havana first comrade Geoff) and his asador chef Conor.

Mike was full of interesting stories about the work, investment, and yes, regulatory compliance required to get a restaurant set up. The food trade sounded like an astonishingly hard and risky business to me.

Then he talked about the concept for El Matador. While the grill and the asador are central to the experience, the idea is to show a little more of Argentine food, not just the meat dishes for which the country is justly famous. Even so, there’s a lot of meat on the menu.

And if we loved the food, Mike reckoned there was a couple of good books to get hold of if we wanted to try and replicate the experience at home. There’s this one:

… and the second was Al Brown’s Stoked.

This evening, the centrepiece of our meal would be a whole split lamb carcass cooked on an asador. Mike warned us that we should have only a very small lunch, and that there was the distinct possibility of there being leftovers to take home. This sounded very good indeed.

Meanwhile, Conor rubbed salt over the lamb, and then showed us how to attach the lamb to the frame that will be suspended over the fire.

Apparently Mike and Conor spent the better part of a year in Mike’s back garden perfecting their asador technique. While this may not always have been the best experience for Mike’s neighbours, apparently local Argentine expats favourably rate the results, so they must be doing it pretty well.

In fact they take this sort of thing pretty seriously in Argentina. The night before, I had been speaking to my Dad, who told me about an Argentinean farmhand on a neighbour’s place who knew how to improvise an asador just as the gauchos do. He welded a couple of flat standards together into an X shape and used a some pieces of corrugated iron to shape his fire. Worked perfectly well by all accounts.

By now Conor had got the fire going nicely and he hung the lamb halves over the fire - not so close as to have the flame touch them, but close enough that when the fire burnt down the hot coals would provide a good steady slow heat:

And that was almost it for the morning session. After coffee and a cake we reluctantly left them at 11am.

The rest of the day couldn’t go fast enough. But at last evening rolled around, and with sitter sorted we headed back into town again.

At the restaurant, the lamb was now fully cooked. Conor took it off the fire:

While it rested (covered), he grilled us up some quick starters: black pudding, kidneys, and sweetbreads. Like many New Zealanders - especially those off farms where we had plentiful meat - I haven’t eaten a lot of offal. I steered away from the kidneys (I’ve never liked the taste, even before Conor told us what he thought they tasted like); but the sweetbreads and the black pudding were delicious, especially smothered in fresh chimichurri salsa:

These disappeared pretty quickly while we watched Conor bone the meat. This didn’t look like too tricky a job, as mostly it was ready to fall off the bone in great juicy handfuls. He sliced the fillet and some of the larger leg pieces… and with that dinner was ready.

Asador is typically eaten with salad. I could describe the salads, which were all pretty good, but to be honest I’ve forgotten them. I was there for the meat, which was utterly delicious: moist, lightly smoked, and cooked to perfection.

At this point I stopped taking photos. There were more important matters at hand.

On the tables were several bottles of a respectable Argentine Malbec, the traditional variety to consume with asador. But nicer still was the other wine there: Tiwaiwaka Lucinda 2007 from Martinborough, a harmonious and savoury Cab Sauv / Merlot / Franc blend. It was just as well supplies of this wine ran out fairly quickly, as I had to work the next day.

In addition to the food and the wine was possibly the most unexpected pleasure of the day - some great talk over beautiful food with a bunch of interesting strangers.

Time sped by. Everyone had seconds. Next, Conor’s dessert, a lovely almond flan served with dulce de leche and a homemade icecream. That dispatched, everyone talked more.

Well, we didn’t want to rush away, but our sitter had school in the morning and our bus wouldn’t wait. We had to say some quick goodbyes.

And later at home: wood smoke in our clothes, full bellies, and a pile of smoky bones from Conor for stock. The happy feeling of a day well spent, and the prospect of one day returning to El Matador.

The best bits of having to go to another city for a day trip are without doubt the flights themselves… if you can get a window seat.

So on the way, you could look to the East through the slightly grubby port, and see:

• Ruckled low cloud in lines along Ruapehu;

And then, below electronic device switchoff, the marks of surface transportation:

• Green fields crossed with the desire lines of stock, gate to gate; trough to trough;
• Giving way to the lifestyle blocks of the rich and famous and their long gravel driveways;
• And on over the close-packed cubicle houses of new suburbia and their bin-speckled roadways;
• Leading to thrombotic motorways
• all converging on
• The Smoak.

But then you’re down in it, and converging on The Smoak yourselves, the spot-hired vesicle filled with cheesy country music sung in Te Reo. Your grey-haired Pākehā driver checks to make sure you’re ok with the music. Yeah, nah, it’s OK.

You’re still nowhere other than in New Zealand.

And in the afternoon, you do it all over again, backwards.

Bear with me while I horribly and lengthily belabour an analogy.

The Magic Book Shop

Imagine a magic book shop that delivers. Imagine that if you want to read something, you just announce your request into the air, and the book appears on your bookshelf.

Of course, this still costs money, but the books are cheaper than those from your regular book shop, and the selection is an order of magnitude better.

Sounds great, doesn’t it. You’d quite like to live near a book shop like that.

But what if this book shop only sells books that are a certain shape? It’s a shape that is fitted to a little book case the shop has individually made and sold to you.

Well, you say, that’s OK: although I did have to pay quite a lot for my special book case, it is magically small and portable, and all these books can be with me all the time. So what if they are a special shape?

Well then… what if you wanted to lend your new favourite book to your friend? Great! Except that, while your friend also bought their own book case from the magic book shop, theirs had its own peculiar shape and your book wouldn’t fit on it.

So, no more lending your favourite books to them, nor they you. Everyone has to buy their own from this book shop. And don’t even think about going to a second hand book shop, or borrowing from the Public Library: their books won’t fit in your book case either.

Still like this book shop?

Worse, what if you buy a book from this book shop, only to find that at some point later the shop has reached into your house and removed the book from your special book case, casting it down the memory hole? It’s magic, right? Anything can happen.

A bit worrying though, eh.

Ignoring all that

So yeah, I figured it would be good to get a special book case Kindle.

I am a sad, sad gadget-loving geek. I knew the issues but I did it anyway.

I made excuses. I figured that it might be a good way to get hold of various textbooks I need for work; and also to provide a bit of convenient holiday reading and the occasional free classic from Project Gutenberg.

I got a no-ads Wifi Kindle 4, as per Marco’s review. And… I like it. A lot.

It turns out that the Kindle is simply superb for consumption of the linear narrative: any book that you can start on page one and read to the end without breaking out to refer to a map, an index, or some earlier passage, is well suited to the device.

This means that your holiday reading is well looked after; and the low power requirements of the e-ink display means you’ll almost never run out of battery when you need it. It’s the perfect travel companion. SOLD!

It’s not so good for those textbooks though. Mostly when I’m trying to learn something new I have to re-read chapters, jump back and forward to refer to facts and concepts mentioned earlier, and generally consume the thing in a non-linear fashion. You just can’t do that easily on a Kindle.

There are exceptions: the eBooks generated by Instapaper are wonderful examples and come with an easy-to-navigate table of contents and the ability to easily jump backwards and forwards between “articles” – but most electronic textbooks I’ve bought so far don’t use this kind of formatting. (Ironically, a very useful and completely free textbook does: Pro Git.)

Perhaps advances in technology will improve upon this aspect of current e-reader technology and make riffling, referring, and re-reading through an eBook just as simple and convenient as the paper version. But maybe not.

So what to do?

Thinking a bit wider, I am a little worried by where this eBook thing is going. The Amazon ecosystem is incredibly tempting, but it comes with real restrictions.

I have made a point of stripping the rights management off all the Amazon books I buy, so that they can be used on any other eBook reader I might purchase in future.

That’s good for me, but it doesn’t alter the bigger problem. By supporting the Amazon ecosystem with my cash, I am also reducing the viability of my friendly local paper book store. Over time, collectively me and all the other eBook buyers will affect the rest of the community through a reduced paper book availability as local book shops either disappear or stick to higher volume titles.

As more of the book market moves to electronic formats, the ability to read and gain new knowledge and enjoyment from books becomes dependent on being able to afford a proprietary book reader and the associated technologies required to access the electronic book shop.

And that’s a couple of gatekeepers that we don’t have now when we pick up a paperback, or buy a book for the kids' birthdays.

So I’m definitely conflicted about the whole thing. It’s a great device. But I’m thinking I’ll just use the Kindle for the kind of shitty holiday fiction I’d be too ashamed to buy; reading the classics; occasional textbooks; and for Instapaper.

Books that I want to own and keep and re-read: those I’ll continue to buy on paper.

I’ve never been much of a sports fan. This is partly related to the fact that I am terrible at every sport I ever tried except the one that involved a good deal of lying down (small-bore rifle shooting, before your mind runs away with you).

At our country primary school there were two sports available in winter: netball (for girls) and rugby (for boys). Our school was very small, and there weren’t many boys in mine and the adjacent year groups, so it was semi-compulsory to play just so a team could be fielded.

I never really enjoyed it. I was much smaller than the other boys, and my lack of speed, complete unco-ordination, and poor eyesight (I couldn’t wear my glasses playing) meant that often as not I was placed on the wing where I could trail around after everyone else without being expected to either catch the ball or pass it on, two things I was pretty hopeless at. Many games I did not even get to touch the ball, and any attempt of mine at tackling the opposition usually resulted, at best, in being shrugged off like an errant piece of dandruff.

On the plus side, there was always the pie and fizzy drink at the end of the match. But the attractions of these were not enough, and I refused to play in my last year at primary school¹. The next year, at boarding school, despite the plethora of new choices available, I again refused to play any winter sport. At one point I was threatened with the cane unless I took one up (they were very interested in keeping the boys gainfully occupied at the weekends: sport on Saturday mornings, church on Sunday mornings) but by keeping a very low profile out of view of the masters I was able to quietly read books instead.

That year was the year of the Springbok Tour. A prefect, the same one who in the interests of science had once attempted to fold me into a small cupboard above a wardrobe², now visited each boy in turn, asking them pointedly as to what their views on the tour were. There was little doubt as to what the correct answer should be.

At that time I had no view (and at the age of 13, why should I have had?), but I resented being forced to have one under threat of violence. So then, and more so over the next few years as I came to an understanding of what happened in 1981, rugby became associated for me with fascistic compulsion, mindless violence, racism and societal conflict. I came to hate it.

That was a long long time ago. It became OK to like rugby again, after the so-called Baby Blacks won the inaugural 1987 World Cup (even though over half of the players in that team had been on the rebel tour to South Africa the previous year). And I have to admit to having enjoyed watching the occasional game over the years: many sports, when played at the highest level, can have a beauty and power that transcends their form, and rugby is no exception to this.

But even today I find myself disinclined to be interested in the upcoming Rugby World Cup, in a way that never happens for any of the other quadrennial sporting events that pass by. I am disturbed by schools having Rugby World Cup teaching programs; school holidays being moved to accommodate it; the government having a minister for it; sponsors trumping the rights of free speech; ad campaigns of unprecedented, though amusing, idiocy; tenuous but intrusive product associations; endless parade of “Official Providers” of this or that; the expense of the tickets; and the general implied assumption that all New Zealanders love the game and should be so jolly pleased to have the Cup here (and stop your moaning: This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things).

I feel like I have to give a shit: I am writing a blog posting; I am thinking about it. I don’t want to.

Countering all this long and complicated personal history, baggage, and (I admit it) general whining though: maybe I should just lighten the fuck up. R. and the girls carry none of this and are more interested in rugby and the tournament generally than I am. For example, B₂ proudly told me the other day that she had asked to play in a “tackle-rugby” tournament for her school³; while R₂, out of the blue, explained to me who her favourite All Black is (Conrad Smith). Their excitement is uncomplicated and true, though perhaps borne of the hype that surrounds us like air at the moment.

Why should I be the wet blanket then? The Rugby World Cup is an Event, the likes of which we shall not see here again. Soak up the atmosphere; join the party; submit to the inevitable. Don’t think, enjoy.

So I relented and booked tickets for us all to see a game⁴; and the girls are very excited at the prospect.

I’m a little bit excited too. Just a little, even though I don’t really want to be. I will probably summon the kind of coolly logical interest that, with a bit of infectious situational enthusiasm supplied by others, leads me to follow the Football World Cup every four years with a degree of closeness. We’ll have fun at the game; we’ll stick up a wall chart and follow the teams we saw on the pitch. I may even come to know enough to have a passable conversation about rugby at work.

Let RWC Inc. chalk up a small victory.

And though I may be crushed, I am not completely bowed. A small piece remains mine. Yes: nothing, ever, will make me like Heineken.

¹ The one exception to this was in a weight-graded tournament - probably the only time I ever enjoyed playing the game - where I, at 12, was captain of a team of 9 year olds, and for once better co-ordinated, faster, and harder than my team mates and opposition. Not that it resulted in much winning, of course.

² I did not fit: my head stuck out. Even slamming the cupboard door repeatedly did not seem to alter this fact. (But I should also say that this sort of thing was pretty rare and in especially in later times, I was no innocent victim either. This was nothing like the Rugby School of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.)

³ Although the tournament is weight-graded, she has not played any contact sport before. And she’ll be playing against a whole lot of boys who have. I suspect she may have an idealised view of what all this will involve, in which case participation may prove traumatic. But I would be happy to be proved wrong.

⁴ Though not one with New Zealand in it as that would have been too expensive: we’re off to Tonga vs. France.

Last month I realised I hadn’t yet spent my birthday money from a few months back. This realisation coincided nicely with a resurgent interest in those ever interesting and cheap Russian watches, of which I have blogged about several times here, here, and here and which now I track on a dedicated board at Pinterest.com.

Anyway, all this mindless cataloguing of stuff led to an inevitable purchase with those “spare” birthday funds, and yesterday the postman delivered the parcel¹.

Here it is, as modelled on my twig wrist:

As you can see, the day of the week is indicated by the red dot. I have decided that the week starts on Mondays, so for me the sixth dot shows it’s Saturday. I like the large and clear numerals, and the elegant fine hands. The overall design is that of a stainless steel rectangle overlaid by a black circle - very simple and strong.

It came with all its original papers, which seem to indicate it was made in September 1992. So a long period in storage may account for its stiffness of winding. Some of the sellers on eBay also caution that watches transported by airmail may need servicing afterwards - presumably the oil evaporates in low pressure environments. And then, this morning I noticed it had lost about 10 minutes in less than 24 hours. So it may have to go in for a lube and adjustment², even though it’s actually brand new (or in eBay’s parlance, NOS - “New Old Stock”).

Despite all this I am very pleased with it. It’s a lovely piece of engineering.

And yes, it has a lovely tick.

¹ Poor postie had to come down all our steps to get me to sign for it, for which I apologised. Great service though - typically the courier drivers just dump stuff in the letter box and bail, regardless of signature requirements.

² The next problem is that the major local watch servicing outfit refuses to handle Russian watches.

…both of them made by humans.

This is the second:

So, some of you will have seen this before, not long after I got it. It’s a watch, a cheap Russian watch, one of several such I own.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, bear with me here, OK?

It’s seen a bit of wear in the last four and a half years. Last year I broke the ricketty bracelet, and had it replaced with a decent leather strap. And even earlier, the numeral 6 fell off and stopped the minute hand from travelling. I had to send it back to Russia to get fixed because the local watch repairers refused to touch it (snobs!).

So I’ll make no pretensions to class for this watch. It is what it is.

And what it is, is engineering magic.

It’s an automatic; in other words, it winds itself. If I wear it every day, I generate enough kinetic energy to power it, and I never have to think about it, never a battery to change.

All I have to do is put it on in the morning. But before I do that, I’ll have a peek in the back, where the workings are exposed behind glass:

Sometimes I take it off so I can look at it, and be soothed by the sight of cogs and wheels; mainsprings and rubies; meshing together and never stopping. A tiny, precise, and wearable machine that announces itself by a gently fragrant ticking.

I think I like this about it best of all: I can pretend that if worst came to worst I could fix it myself. It’s just a complicated piece of mechanics after all, no electricity involved; like an old car there’d be a hope of me pulling it to pieces and building it back again. This is an illusion to cherish!

And a wonderfully cheap thrill compared to a quality Swiss Automatic, which typically start at 10 to 20 times more than this one cost me.

Maybe one day I’ll find a better automatic watch: it will have a 24-hour dial; it will be classier; and of a smaller diameter; and higher quality… but there’s no way it will be as good value as this one.

And anyway, the way this one’s going, maybe I won’t need another.

…both of them made by humans.

This is the first:

(Apologies for forgetting to take the camera off 1600 ASA. Duh!)

It looks like some flake of rock, maybe volcanic, but its purpose is clear once picked up:

One summer, about 800 years ago, a group of people came up from the coast and camped in the hills of what would one day be called Central Otago. They brought with them rocks of a peculiar and rare type found around the naturally burning coalseams closer to the coast: rocks made of a cooled and somewhat glassified melted clay.

Where the hills' ridges narrowed to a waist they’d sometimes build a pit, and make a brush fence on either side. Then they’d hunt their prey down the ridge, possibly with the large-jawed dogs whose remains have been found in the region, and trap them in the pit.

And then they’d feast.

They were moa hunters. And this is a blade, possibly for a left-handed person, knocked out on the spot from those special rocks and used for skinning or butchering the large birds. Later, it was discarded; just one out of place rock chip among thousands of others on that hillside.

Hundreds of years later the land was ploughed for pasture, the mark of ages smoothed-over pits and ovens a clear black against the otherwise brown soil. A small boy could wander there, and did, finding many pieces of ancient rubbish.

I liked that I could find things once touched and shaped by the earliest inhabitants of the land.

This one in particular I liked because it was the only black one I ever found, and one of the most shaped (the few other shaped pieces I have are light grey, or brown; and the rest are just chips, the complement to something shaped that is lost). It feels nice in my hand, though it’s probably too blunt now to be much use, except maybe for skinning.

It’s been with me everywhere, even to the antipodes. And held in my hand, it reminds me of my other home, not far from that Central Otago hillside.

I’ve been having this series of dreams over the last few weeks in which I’m employee number 4 of some local tech startup.

I say employee, but I’m not sure if I am. I get the sense I’m only there sometimes, and whenever I turn up, the two chaps are always bickering and playing on a game console, while the girl is hanging about looking anxious.

Last night she was trying to tell me something important, but at that very moment I became aware that I was in my recurring dream again and she, and whatever it was that she was trying to tell me, evaporated.

Perhaps I’m supposed to be the startup’s “adult supervision” - but if so, I’m not doing a very good job of it.

But now I’m wondering: what is it that my dream startup is creating?

There are many interesting coffee-making methods being employed in cafés around Wellington these days. In theory this is all in pursuit of different shades of coffee flavour and feel… but I’m shallow: my favourites always seem to be ones involving elaborate glassware.

So today, on my weekly visit to Customs Brew Bar to pick up some more of their fresh Harrar beans, I was very happy when Ralph invited me to stick around for a little bit, as he was going to crank up the Cona Siphon.

Yes: yet another siphon brewing device, but this one is surely the coolest looking coffee making device (outside of, arguably, a balance brewer) available today.

Here’s a video of the action¹ taken with (and lashed together on) the iPhone:

Cona Siphon @CustomsBrewBar from dubh on Vimeo.

We’re finally back from holiday now. At some point I’ll post a tediously exhaustive account of the central portion, our five days on the Otago Central Rail Trail, but for now here are three photos I quite like that in their own way typify their portion of our time away.

All three were taken with my iPhone 4, which really does have a nice camera. I find myself taking even more photos than before, and as we shall see in a later posting, taking video too. And more photos means that on average there should be more good photos, and so it proves.

At Lake Hawea:

Yes, the water really is that clear; with a polarising filter you can make boats appear to float unsupported. It’s also very cold, hence the wetsuit (though I did not use one when I went in for a couple dips).

On the Rail Trail itself, this evening view of the Hawkduns and Mt Ida appeared as I was returning from the Oturehua pub (we had run out of wine, and I had to make a dash on the bike for more):

And lastly, on the long trip home, there was a moment on Cook Strait when we watched the foggy clag besieging Wellington lift off the South Coast hills, momentarily:

Of course, it clamped down even closer as the evening wore on, and it hasn’t left yet, 36 hours later (even as other parts of New Zealand enjoy hot and sunny weather).

Definitely an ending, then.

As I’ve posted about earlier, these days caffeine-wise I’m off the espresso and on to pour-over filter coffee, like the Chemex.

I’m far from the only one around Wellington following this path and recently Coffee Supreme, sensing a market, have started a new range of super-premium single-origin coffees at around double the price of their regular beans. The first is the Nekisse.

Now I really know very little about this bean, save that it’s from a single farm in the Sidamo region in Ethiopia, and it’s supposed to be amazing. But I was lucky: last week Ralph at Customs Brew Bar slipped me a couple cups worth of an early roast to try.

I got them home and gave them a good look and smell. They were very fragrant; similar to the characteristic Sidamo fruitiness (which, if you haven’t come across it, is itself a revelatory coffee experience) but cleaner and brighter.

The beans were physically slightly smaller (left), and of a more even size than the regular Sidamo (right). This roast was not as dark as the Sidamo either; Ralph tells me that the Nekisse roast they’re selling now is a little darker (unfortunately the lighting in my photo doesn’t make the colour difference very clear - it’s a little more obvious in the flesh).

Anyway, I tried the Nekisse in the Chemex, but it didn’t really set my world on fire. As a breakfast coffee, it was very nice, but I actually preferred the regular Sidamo. Then I thought I’d better give it a proper comparison test.

As I don’t have two Chemex filter glasses, I thought I’d try something I found in Japan City¹: a couple of cheap plastic versions of the classic Hario drip cones. I also picked up a pack of the filters on the next aisle over (get the larger size, if you are heading to Japan City yourself).

And so this morning it was time for the test.

I used the same amounts of beans (20g in this case, though I usually use 25g) freshly ground at my usual coarse-but-not-as-coarse-as-French-Press grade and placed in the pre-rinsed filter cones.

I then poured a cup and a half of recently boiled water over each, taking care to let the grounds bloom before pouring all the water in.

The results were pretty interesting. The Nekisse was light and very very fruity, seemingly more fruity than previously when I had it in the Chemex. It had amazing berry flavours - to me, lighter and less tannic, like the taste of strawberries. Yet surprisingly, the regular Sidamo tasted flat and almost muddy in comparison. I’ll definitely be getting some more of this Nekisse, I thought.

But thinking back to my experiences with the Chemex, where I’d found the regular Sidamo more interesting than the clean but bland Nekisse, it became clear that a lot of the differences between the Chemex brews and the my plastic cone filter brews were in the paper filters used.

Chemex sometimes gets a bit of a bad rap for filtering out too much flavour; so it seemed that not only was it taking out a lot of the less desirable flavours in the regular Sidamo, it may also have been removing some of the good flavours in the Nekisse. On the other hand, the cheap paper filters I was using in the plastic drip cones were allowing more flavours through, good and bad, but to the advantage of the Nekisse.

I’d always thought this sort of effect was a bit overstated, but obviously that’s not so. So it would seem that some brewing methods work better than others with each single origin bean. Yes! A whole new dimension of coffee nerdery to explore!

So, to conclude: if you’re having people over and you want to blow them away with an amazing brewed coffee experience, you should try them on the Nekisse in a Hario drip cone or similar. Because of the quality of the beans, even a flimsy paper filter is enough (and probably desirable). But for everyday usage, I think I’ll be sticking to the Sidamo in my Chemex (much to the relief of my wallet, no doubt).

On the other hand, maybe I should get just the tiniest amount of the Nekisse. Just a little bit more…

This is a kete nui:

Not that a “big basket” was what we were looking for, as we did the tourist thing in one of New Zealand’s oldest settlements.

Russell, formerly Kororareka, the “hell hole of the Pacific”, and haunt of the legendary Bully Hayes, is now a polite, and somewhat dull tourist town, though very pretty.

We had caught the ferry over from Paihia, a town now far more deserving of the “hellhole” appellation; smothered in motels and tourist villas; slow moving grey geese; and overpriced cafés with imported and stale coffee beans.

Back in the wild old days the protestant English and Catholic French were vying for supremacy in the all-important tally of who could convert the most “natives” (though all the natives really wanted was guns) and so the Marist brothers were sent out from Lyon to Kororareka to do their thing.

And so they set up this building, a factory for making books. A tannery downstairs, and upstairs printing presses and paper making.

There is something pretty moving about that. Here was the birth of literacy in New Zealand; some really hard work creating a Māori version of the Bible; printing it and distributing it. Even if you don’t agree with the content of the message, it’s a pretty big step, setting up a printing press in a lawless land and teaching the locals to read.

As it happens the locals were pretty self-sufficient anyway, and in the end only the weight of immigrant numbers–my ancestors, much later, among them–overcame the locals after some close-run wars, but still, something started here that could not be stopped. You have to wonder how many of Pompallier’s bibles ended up read avidly by fevered Hau Hau and prophets of vision.

On the other hand, Māori didn’t need the bible to be independent businessmen of note, supplying the still thin Australian colonies with food for many years before they managed to become self-sufficient. So literacy is over-rated, from some points of view.

With all that in my mind, we climbed up into the attic of the Pompallier Mission. And here was something different again, the kete nui, something the locals of now had made using techniques of old.

Which is all very interesting. But the size and shape suggested other uses, a vagrant thought that was confirmed for me when the lady collecting the money on the entrance way asked if I thought the kete nui looked like a coffin.

Well yes, that’s what I thought too. But whose?

In the last couple of years I’ve cut out most dairy products after developing what seems to be a mild milk intolerance. This was probably something to do with my two, sometimes three daily lattés and flat whites. Or maybe I’m just getting old. Anyway, over time I switched to macchiatos, and finally, tiny espressos.

But, nice though espressos are (and a good espresso is a godlike taste), they sometimes feel a little unsatisfying: there’s only a couple of mouthfuls in them at best. And the other problem with espresso is that it’s just so damn difficult to get right at home.

We have a pretty capable home espresso machine, and a very good home grinder, but there’s so many other variables that are hard to control, such as the amount of beans used; their age; their nature; the size and shape of the grounds; and the strength used to tamp the grinds into the basket; the heat and pressure of the water applied.

Most times I can make a decent job at it, and over time I’ve become better, but truly great espresso is a rarity in our kitchen. Previously, I could cover it up with steamed milk and make a pretty awesome flat white, but now as espresso its shortcomings are horribly exposed.

But what could I do? Enter the Chemex.

But, I hear you splutter, that’s some kind of a filter coffee contraption!

Why yes it is. I’ve gone post-espresso!

The Chemex was invented by a German-American Chemist during the War, and is basically a glass filter funnel welded to the top of your standard chemistry flask. Over the last 12 months or so several of the cafés and around town - Peoples Coffee in Garrett Street; the Customs Brew Bar; and latterly Memphis Belle, have started offering the Chemex in particular as a way to sample their single origin coffee beans.

I ran across the Chemex at Customs Brew Bar, where my mind was blown by the intense and idiosyncratic taste of their single origin beans from the Sidamo region of Ethiopia. I couldn’t stop raving about it. It was coffee, but full and rich, without any bitterness; the tastes of the beans revealed, and rivalling a glass of wine for interest and complexity.

So in February R. bought me a Chemex as an Anniversary present.

I started making the coffee in the Chemex as a weekend treat; then as I got faster at it the “treat” extended to every weekday morning. I could have a satisfyingly full mug of hot tasty coffee, all attended by a ritual somewhat easier, but even more pleasing, than that of making an espresso.

And every time I look at it I get a little rush of lab nostalgia: my first degree was in chemistry and so the Chemex is like a little link back to an (in truth not very regretfully) abandoned career path.

So, how does it work? First, you take a filter paper. This bit is just like Chemistry 101.

Then you fold it in half:

And then the little extra bit you fold over again:

And then you fold the whole thing in half again:

Now you can open the folded paper into a cone, and place it into the top of the flask. You should have a pocket that’s half one thickness of paper, and the other half three thicknesses; place the three thicknesses on the funnel side:

It’s important to rinse the filter before using it, to get rid of any tastes that might be in the paper. If you use just-boiled water it will also help warm up the flask.

Now it’s time to get the beans ready. As you can see, I usually use 25 grams of coffee:

More chemistry nostalgia here, with all this taring and weighing. I bought the scales on TradeMe so I could be more consistent with weighing the beans for espresso¹. It’s not really necessary to be this super-exact with the Chemex, however—I’m just a geek.

I usually grind them to medium-coarse in the grinder; a bit finer than you might do for a French Press.

Don’t forget to tip the filter wash-water out before putting your grinds in! Now you can pour your water in on top. I usually use about 350ml of just boiled water. But don’t get too carried away with the pouring! Initially, just cover the grinds with water and let them bubble a little bit. This is called the “bloom”:

Apparently it’s some sort of outgassing of nitrogen and other volatiles from the grounds themselves. Whatever causes it, let it subside (15 to 30 seconds) before pouring in any more water.

Once you’ve got all your water through the filter—it usually takes about two or three fills—you can remove the filter with the grinds.

We usually keep our grinds for spreading around the herb garden (we’ve heard the residual caffeine deters snails, though who knows if this is true) and the paper goes into the compost.

Finally - it’s all ready for drinking… black, of course.

And that’s how you do it.

I never believed I’d be drinking filter coffee every day - wasn’t espresso supposed to be the be all and end all of good coffee?² But I guess as always, it’s good to know there’s never One True Way with anything in life. For me, the Chemex is an easier way to get a beautiful cup of coffee in the morning; I still visit my favourite baristas in the afternoons to get an espresso.

And the Chemex brings something new, by allowing a focus on the interesting tastes and characteristics of different coffee-growing regions around the world. If you’re at any of the cafés I’ve mentioned give it a go. You’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Update: People have asked: “Where do I purchase these wondrous pieces of alchemical equipment?” In Wellington, you can buy them directly from both Peoples Coffee, and from Supreme, cafés. Both the Peoples Online Shop and Supreme’s Online Shop also stock them, if you don’t live in Wellington, and while you’re browsing at Supreme consider one of their small but perfectly formed Hario ceramic burr hand grinders if you are without this other essential piece of coffee-making equipment.

Last week - well, the last two rather intense days of last week - were all about Webstock, which I may or may not get around to writing up.

Immediately after the drinks on Friday night R. and the girls picked me up and whisked me away for fish and chips on the Petone foreshore followed by a drive out to the Catchpool Valley for some camping with Ralph and Kathleen and their kids.

OK, so I have to admit I wasn’t entirely keen. It was a bit of a wrenching mode switch from webstocking to camping. In the dark, I was momentarily excited when I was able to name the bright stars using the Sky Voyager app on my iPhone. And luckily for me R. and the others were being tolerant of my need to hold on to my techno-comforter.

The next morning was lovely. However our sleep was not: between the pack of munters over the way who didn’t stop yahooing until 2:30am (and at one point we heard them discussing loudly their plan to take one of the kids' bikes for a ride, but lesser yahoos prevailed) and the pigs, moreporks and other odd screechy things wandering about, and the hard hard ground I didn’t get much rest.

Can you tell? Yes, it’s been almost 20 years since the last time I went camping. And I’m a whiner.

In the late morning we hung out down at the creek. By this time I was dehydrated, caffeine deprived, and overtired. I needed occupational therapy, and then I remembered what my father used to do for us on the banks of the Pomahaka River in those hot summers of the 1970s. So I got out my pocket knife and cut a flax stalk, and I made a boat.

One waka was not enough, though this one was the most elaborate. Eventually all the kids had their own, and they floated them with intent smiles lit by the water’s reflections from the pools and rivulets they carved in the gravelly sandbars.

Meanwhile I was looking for spiders and other interesting invertebrate excitement; and the others joined in too. There was lots to be seen…

Beautiful pebble-speckled wolf spiders running fast across the stones, shying away from the water:

Smooth and sleek giant-jawed tetragnathid spiders surrounded by the translucent shells of their prey:

And later, parked on their line and waiting for dinner to arrive, their undersides an unlikely stripe of yellow:

And crayfish:

This latter caused a LOT of excitement amongst the kids, some of whom had never seen one before (though our girls have encountered them up at Khandallah Park). I picked it up behind the eyes so they could have a close look; and they took turns holding on to it gently. It was much prettier than the muddy green brown ones we used to catch in the ponds and creeks around the farm. I have to admit… it actually looked edible. If it were a little larger.

There was lots more: dragonflies; little invertebrates scudding about in pools; lovely grey water-skating nurseryweb spiders. Shade growing across the water bringing relief from the sun. The kids starting catching things and showing them to me. It all was great fun.

But then it was getting on into the late afternoon, and we had to go home.

It was a pretty good way to start the weekend, all things considered. Curry at Petone’s Curry Heaven on the way home, and a whole Sunday to recuperate.

Though maybe next time we’ll bring a thermarests for sleeping on, and a billy to boil for coffee…

The older we get, the more predictable we men become. Thus it was that in my quest (once more) for the “something small” spousal Christmas present I turned, just as I did before, to the Wargames shop down in the BNZ Centre.

This time, I came away with a fabulous little two person game called Fjords.

In this game you use place little hexagonal cards turn-by-turn to “explore” an area of fjords. At appropriate spots you place a farmhouse—and which spots are the “appropriate” ones is where the tactical interest comes in.

After all the tiles that can be placed are placed (there are some rules on placement which mean you might not use all of them) the next phase of the game starts. Here, you place your “fields” (some little wooden disks) turn-by-turn on tiles contiguous to your farm houses and your other fields. You have to go around mountains (the dark areas on the tiles) and water; so as you can imagine there is a tactical element here which extents back to the exploration phase earlier.

This makes for a pleasing mix of tactics and map-making bundled into a relatively quick and simple game, and we’ve enjoyed playing this against each other. The girls play this quite well too. Recommended as a quick, fun, relatively cheap and compact game that will travel easily¹.

The other weekend was Anniversary Weekend (i.e., there’s a Monday off to “celebrate” the founding of Wellington province, a political division that ceased to exist over 133 years ago) and, as has been typical with this summer, it was wet and cold. I convinced R. that buying a new game was more cost-effective than lunch out and going to the pictures as a family (almost true!) and so, back to the Wargames shop we went, this time coming out with Ticket to Ride Europe.

This game is altogether longer and more complicated—but possibly more satisfying. We have a map of Europe with various coloured routes in it; each player needs to “claim” these routes as they can by collecting cards of the same colour and placing their little plastic trains as appropriate. There are many modifications to this basic play, such as “destination tickets"that specify certain cities that the player must make connected routes between; “tunnels” and “ferries” that require extra completion steps; and bonuses such as one for the longest continuous route.

R. and I have enjoyed this game quite a lot—but as it involves quite a bit more long range thinking than some of the other games we have it’s looking like the girls are getting a bit tired of it. We’re having to experiment with various handicaps to even it up a little so that they have a chance of winning.

It’s also fairly long (the fastest game we had with the kids was 1½ hours) for small people of wandering attention… though possibly they’re just a little tired. Maybe it’s a game that is probably true to the 8+ label on the box.

We’ll have to try playing it some more two-player and see how we go with that.

Which is not quite right, because we are Finally Here, and not really On The Road anymore.

More pictures as and when I find either the patience or a better internet connection, but here’s a panorama of Lake Hāwea centred on Corner Peak (which some of you may know from the Craig Potton calendar photo).

We came from the north, down through the Haast Pass and along the northern part of Lake Wanaka; over The Neck to be presented with an utterly flat Lake Hāwea.

It’s not often that the lake is dead calm this late in the afternoon; but so it was today, and the southerly passing through yesterday appeared to have cleared the air of both dust and cloud.

A few more days like this, please.

In the absence of other things to blog about, I present this photo that I took a couple weeks ago.

I’m not sure what the designers were thinking, back in the ’30s - trying to marry Art Deco and Māori influences? - but there, unmistakeably, is Cthulhu. It’s a wonder the Great Old Ones haven’t consumed Wellington already, with blasphemies like this decorating our buildings.

The last time we returned from the Eastern Bay of Plenty we stopped on the way. As you do.

We fetched up at Millton Vineyards, missing any signage that might have dissuaded us. It was just over two years ago, and it was, as we found out later, the middle of harvest.

Eventually someone came out to the cellar door. He apologised for the wait, saying he’d been busy (oops, we thought), and introduced himself as James Millton (double oops). We thought he’d send us away, and who could blame him.

Instead he sat us down, drawing a couple of tasting glasses of freshly pressed grape juice for the girls, and ran us through his range. That kind of personal approach works well for us. We ended up buying several bottles of special occasion stuff, the Chenin Blanc in particular standing out.

We’d long finished our purchases from that day, or so I’d thought. Recently though we’ve cleared out the spare room for B₂ - part of the recent renovation work - and our last box of wine was among the final stack of relocated stuff in the living room waiting for a new home.

And in there was this bottle of Clos de Ste. Anne Millton 2005 The Crucible Syrah. Which of course we could find a new home for. Once we’d finished saying the name. We’ve been rehoming it this evening, warming and decanting it before pouring, and soon (I can’t wait!) we’ll provide a similar service for its smaller brother, the Essencia Chardonnay.

The syrah is perfectly balanced; peppery, as you’d expect, but full and smooth. My vocabulary is defeated. It was fucking good. And a nice birthday treat for me.

Recommended. And so is Millton.

Just as this time last year we’ve been wandering about in Masterton’s Queen Elizabeth Park.

We started, as always, with lunch at Café Cecille. It is under new management, and was a little more focussed and sharper on their game than in some of our previous visits. They do the usual café fare, but classily done, and I’d recommend the place. Especially if you’ve worked up a bit of an appetite wandering about the park.

And the park is just beautiful in there at the moment.

The kids walked back with their grandparents, and R. and I lingered, taking photos. We nearly filled up the memory card.

One last image to hold:

Idyllic. Pity we have to return to Wellington tomorrow.

Has anyone noticed a change in Wattie’s Tomato sauce lately? Yeah, OK, so I’m continuing my investigations into things that really matter… but… have you?

I have. Last can we opened seemed strangely thin, and the kids managed to splurge through it in just a few days.

Luckily we had an older squeezy container to compare the new can to:

Aha, so all is explained. It’s quite a different formula now: 6% less tomato; 47% less salt; 32% less sugar… and if my sense of taste is correct, more vinegar.

So, what’s the verdict? It’s certainly a good move for Wattie’s - it must be quite a bit cheaper to make. The thinner texture also means that customers will use more. And I bet the price didn’t go down in the slightest.

No posting like this would be complete without the obligatory whiff of fact-free conspiracy-mongering. Is the new flavour closer to, or further from, similar tomato sauces made overseas by Wattie’s owner’s Heinz ? If we can be acclimatised to some dodgy Aussie version of tomato sauce perhaps SOMEDAY SOON THEY’LL TAKE OUR SAUCE AWAY!! OH NOES!!!

But more importantly… do I care? Do you care? Did you notice any change? Will you still buy tomato sauce?

And… does it still taste OK? Probably. But it feels like a little bit of a rip-off now.

So the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary has rebranded itself to Zealandia, even got in the new Prime Minister to help them launch.

I find the name pretty ridiculous actually. No doubt I’ll get used to it, but for me “Zealandia” is that rather outdated female representation of colonialist ambitions for New Zealand, a southern Britannia. One of the early colonial boosters even wrote a book called “Zealandia, Britain of the South” which you can read in all its amusing fullness here. (The racist bits are less amusing, of course.)

Later, Zealandia appeared on the New Zealand coat of arms, where she remains to this day, and had statues built in her name, such as this Boer War memorial at Palmerston.

And in surfing about for more info on Zealandia, I discovered a piece that must surely be the last word on the subject. Written by the great Denis Glover for the 1966 Encyclopaedia of New Zealand :

And so rose up Zealandia, full-armed… […] On music scores and programmes she wore her cloche helmet – a sad sort of coal scuttle – with a sword cast carelessly at her feet, the right hand clutching a cornucopia pouring forth apples and pears while from the left there dangled the caduceus. Depending on the skill of the artist, her expression ranged from vacuous insipidity to a crystal-gazing trance.

OK, so Zealandia is also the name that geologists more recently have given to the long-vanished island continent that our islands are the diminished remainder of; so the Sanctuary at least have some basis for the name.

It still strikes me as a bit lame though.

Last weekend, being helpfully annexed to that most sacred of Australasian secular holy days Anzac Day, was a long one. And so we went over the hill into the Wairarapa to Masterton to stay with R.’s parents.

It’s lovely and autumnal over there at the moment, and while we were there the weather held (against expectations) and we had warm fine days for the most part.

Masterton is blessed with Queen Elizabeth Park. It’s a good place to wander about in at this time of year - acres of exotic trees all coloured beautifully; a lake; a pretty good kids playground; and at the weekend, a miniature train. Fun for everyone:

And I forgot to mention one of the best Cafés in the Wairarapa - Café Cecille - is in the park, with another café over the way at the very fine Aratoi Museum of Art and History.

But enough of the travel-guide stuff. At the end of it all, the kids had the most fun with the simple stuff - and some new friends - and so here’s my favourite photo of the weekend:

It’s been a long, mild autumn so far. Long may it last…

I’ve been wanting to play around with HDR and tonemapping for a while now.

While out and about the other lunchtime I took a series of handheld photos to make into an HDR. I had remembered the copy of Photoshop CS3 on the work laptop that lives at home, with its handy “Merge to HDR” functionality that also corrects for handheld wobbles between the photos in the series to be merged.

The free tool I use, qtpfsgui, or at least its Mac version, doesn’t yet do this (although it will soon) for HDR creation (but it has a large range of tonemapping algorithms though). I’d much sooner use it for both the HDR creation and tonemapping, but unless I try again using a tripod to take the source images, I’ll need to wait.

Here’s some results:

Ferns vs The Majestic Centre

Tonemapped Ferns

Freakshow Ferns

OK, so the first one is by way of comparison: it’s a normal shot I took at the same time.

The others were made using qtpfsgui; the first of these is my attempt at a relatively restrained tonemap - something that might fit into the True-Tone HDR group on Flickr.

The next is, well… interesting. There are no doubt many Photoshop or Gimp filters that could achieve a similar effect. So it may or may not be a little pointless.

Like many technology-based tools, HDR and tonemapping look like they need careful and considered (and probably sparing) use to avoid a geeks-gone-wild effect.

Plus good source material, which is something I need to do more work on.

I’ve been dying to try out the new camera - the more I read and attempt to understand about SLRs the more it seems that copious amounts of practise is probably the true teacher.

I’d been wanting to wander off for a couple hours and do just that… but I hit upon a better idea. We’d all go - and having cameras enough we could all take photos. And though I hadn’t expected R. to be wanted to be dragged along, she was keen too. (If it were me I’d stay in bed - the luxury of a quiet house, if only temporarily, without the kids is extremely appealing.) So that’s what we did this morning, walking up to the top of Tinakori Hill.

The light was that high overcast not-quite full sun. I took a nice panorama, and the Japanese ship in the harbour looked pretty good in the calm water, even if my gratuitous attempts at making an HDR of the scene were stymied by constant activity above and on the water. Maybe another day, and once I can figure out how to get the camera to bracket across several EVs (note use of technical terms I barely understand).

On the way home though, I took the two photos I’m most pleased with. The first is of some handsome ferns I spotted on the path:

Unfortunately the depth of field isn’t as good as I’d like - I didn’t have time to set up the tripod for a nice slow shot as it was getting near lunch, and we had quite a ways to walk home.

Then, down on the road, several of these pretty flowers were poking through the fence:

I’m not sure how this one came out so well… but by this time the cloud was getting thicker and the light was a lot softer and greyer. Perhaps this accounts for the flower’s almost uncanny glow, which seems to counteract the fact that the only bit in focus is the very centre (and even then only arguably).

Oh, and did I mention? R. and the girls enjoyed themselves too. We’ll have to do this again another weekend morning.

As we swept around the corner the moon started rising over the hills ahead. It was stunningly beautiful, this large harvest moon, limned against a darkening purple sky.

We were driving back from the Bic Runga concert, coming into that long valley back road between Martinborough and Gladstone. If there was a place in the North Island that I had to live forever, it would be here: lightly native wooded hills, deep valleys full of bush, clean pastures, and a perfect building platform on every ridge you pass. And not over developed, either; just another country area with a few farms and the occasional vineyard.

I expect the people here are too canny to subdivide (if I had a thousand acres here I would be too) so it’s just a dream. But a nice one. This yellow moon makes it sing (a Neville Brothers' song).

Yet another, it’s true. This one is special though. It’s my Christmas present from R. and the girls.

It’s a Vostok, purchased from RussianWatch.net (which incidentally I would recommend: big range, good friendly service, and fast shipping).

It’s automatic, and unlike the two Raketas is water-resistant, has illuminated hands, and a date. (OK, so you can tell much of this from the face, but indulge me here - I’m venting an obsession). I fell in love with the beautiful white and stainless face, but the clincher on the deal was this:

Yes! A (very large) peephole for watch pr0n! I can get my jollies by looking at it any time I like!

The large metal plate with the “B” is the winder: with the movement of your arm during the day the “B” rotates and winds the spring. Most ingenious.

I think that’s enough watches for now though. And I’ll have to cancel that standing search on eBay before I get into trouble.

A while back I mentioned that I had another Raketa on the way from Russia via eBay. Well, today it arrived:

I like that it’s black. I like the very modern space theme of the thing, with the sun and the moon eclipsing one another once an hour. And like its sibling, it’s all mechanical and has a beautiful sounding movement (and the movement looks pretty good too).

It’s called a “kopernik”, presumably after the Polish astronomer. But according to one eBay auction I read, this design was popularly known in the eighties (in theory this when this particular watch was actually manufactured) as the “Misha and Raisa” after Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev. Which counts as a pretty nice tribute to them, too.

And R. is asking me how am I going to choose which watch to wear in the morning. I don’t know yet.

A month or two after I got my nifty 24-hr watch the already loose crown started to rattle. Or rather, the entire mechanism and face inside the case started to move about in response to the wobbly crown.

It didn’t seem to affect the working of the watch, as far as I could tell - it still kept remarkable good time (within about 30 seconds per day). Not bad for eBay, I thought!

But then today, it just stopped at 17:15. When I got home I could see that the face and mechanism had got wedged against the glass, and possibly the hands were blocked from travelling.

So. I thought I’d take the back off and have a look, as you do.

And as I took the back off, the answer presented itself: a tiny screw had come out. You can see the hole on the outside of the mechanism directly above the large cog. It seemed that this screw, and its twin 180° around the outside, were there to lock the mechanism and face to the back of the case. Somehow it had become loose, and over time worked its way out. I’m lucky it didn’t get stuck in the mechanism and cause real damage.

Anyway, with the help of a set of $1.99 screwdrivers from Dick Smith I was able to get the screw back in. And cool! No rattle. But look at that mechanism! The surprisingly quick movements, the sweet sound, the captivating complexity. And all completely understandable by observation and disassembly, were I foolhardy enough. There’s something nice about that, something that can’t be said of any of my other, more electronic obsessions.

I’ve actually already gone mildly potty on these all-mechanical Russian watches, particularly the Raketa ones. I found that you can subscribe via RSS to any keyword search you might fancy on eBay. And so now there’s another watch coming (I hope) that is quite different to this… but just as cool.

But don’t worry, I’ll be sure to let you all know when it’s arrived.

My purchase of the other week finally arrived! When we got in late Sunday night, there on the kitchen bench was a little padded envelope from Finland.

I have to wonder where the £12 for postage went when I spotted the €1.10 of stamps on the envelope. It’s a typical ploy of eBay seller, I find. But never mind. Because the watch is just fantastic.

Sure… the crown wobbles a bit… it’s probably not water resistant in any way… and it seems to gain about 20 seconds per day… it may even be a fake. and it probably won’t last all that long… but I don’t care. I love it.

And why? Well just look at it:

It’s beautifully simple. The face is uncluttered and clean, almost minimalist, without losing function. There are just two colours, black and white. It makes a lovely clear (but not distractingly so) ticking noise, just what you’d expect an old fashioned watch to sound like. That little bit of Cyrillic lettering tells a story: that it was made, or faked to look like it was made, during the Soviet era: a “Rocket” brand watch.

But the best bit is the 24-hour dial. It’s amazing how entrenched people’s expectations of clocks are after learning to glance at one and take in the time without thinking. So glancing at this one and expecting to get the time is a bit of a challenge. You’d think it was about five past ten, but in fact it’s seven minutes past seven in the evening. Showing it to other people is always interesting: at first they think the watch is set to the wrong time, before they figure it out.

I’m still undecided as to whether midday or midnight should be at the top of the dial - midday would be easier to adjust to and would better represent the apparent movement of the sun around the earth (assuming that’s the way you think of clock time, as I do sometimes). But it seems most of these designs have midnight at the top, and in any case it doesn’t take long to get used to.

All this has started me on a whole new obsession. Like I needed another.

It started innocently enough. Asked to check a work colleague’s Trade Me listing for bidding action (I have somewhat wider access than is usual at work) I rather nosily started looking at the feedback on her previous auctions.

Which led to a seller she’d bought from earlier who was now selling an interesting Russian wristwatch.

Which led to this site.

Which, later at home, led to me seeing what similar stuff was available elsewhere on the web.

Which lead to several hours of marvelling at the range of cool Russian Military watches out there at extremely reasonable prices.

Which led to me checking out eBay, because prices will almost always be even more reasonable there.

Which eventually led to a bid on the watch you see here.

Which I have now won and paid for.

Now I have to hope that:

1. it arrives;
2. it works;
3. it stays working.

And up until yesterday I’d never been the slightest bit interested in obtaining a new wristwatch.

I’m so weak.

My cousin Ross lives in Papua New Guinea, working for a conservation NGO. He’s an interesting guy: he really needs his own blog. For various reasons, including his own safety, he’s probably not likely to get himself one. But we love hearing his stories whenever he comes home.

One Christmas he gave all the females of the family these rather nice handcrafted string tote bags, or bilums in Pidgin. I need to ask Ross what they are made of - but they are made using all local materials and and dyes.

R. ended up not only using hers a lot, but really admiring the art and craft of them. She asked him if she could get some more. So Ross emailed back a photo of several for sale through some PNG National friends of his. By coincidence the three R. chose turned out to be one from each of the three wives of the local head man.

The other object between them on the far wall is something else, a baby carrier that Ross sent over when R₂ was born.

So now they are displayed on our wall. I imagine their makers must think us pretty strange for spending good money on these things and then not using them…

There’s a photo: a sunny clear windless day in May 1987 on top of Mount Victoria. One of those many May Wellington days in which the wind stops and the sun shines and there is really no better place on earth.

Four young people stand against the harbour vista, smiling and squinting a little against the bright sunlight. Just as the photo is taken a butterfly lands on one of them; and the photo records that peculiar coincidence.

Anyway, I’m behind the camera. I’m not yet 19.

I was at University in Dunedin, off the family farm in Central Otago. These holidays, instead of helping on the farm, I’ve decided to strike out a bit.

In Wellington, it’s several months before the sharemarket crash, and the place is booming. I count 34 cranes in a wide arc from the central city right across Te Aro. I’m staying with my older cousin (one of the four in the photo - all with careers still to build, children still to have; but already working and living it large) and I’m having a ball. There’s a freedom here that’s at least partially explained by the distance from my family; the chance to explore a new and bigger city; and my welcoming and generous hosts.

So, remembering that holiday and others similar, it was natural that five years later as my future wife finished at Otago, we decided to shift to Wellington. There were no jobs for us in the South. Parochialism stopped me from going to Christchurch; something else from Auckland. We chose Wellington: a town we both knew; a harbour town somewhat akin to our beloved Dunedin; and a town big enough to be yourself in yet small enough to love in its entirety.

A crap damp flat in Mt Cook (where I saw my first cockroach) followed by the sunlit uplands of Mt Vic; and we became Wellingtonians, just like that.

The years have passed, thirteen now, and this is my home. We have a house, and two kids born here that will one day cheer for the Hurricanes (sorry, but I can’t do it yet: Go Highlanders!).

And so there are many things that keep us here. Some are (without thinking too deeply about it):

• the culture. You can find it here, high and low - probably helped in part by having the seat of government here… but there are always things to do; and later, things to talk about.
• the coffee. From three espresso places, to about three hundred in just a few years. You’d be lucky to find too many other places in the world where coffee is so ingrained into the local lifestyle.
• the food. Restaurants, cafés, and Moore Wilsons.
• the politics. You’ve got to love Wellington Central, the seat where anything can happen… and has, since the advent of MMP.
• the geography. Those iconic houses stuck to the steep green hills as you fly in say it all: there’s no other place like this. And it’s this that keeps the city in bounds, walkable, and therefore liveable.
• the sea. Surrounding the city, defining its other major boundaries and providing interest, recreation (and sustenance) for the city’s inhabitants.
• the people. Cosmopolitan, welcoming and open, there’s a place here.

Which is not to say that I always love this place: but if I were omnipotent there are just two things I’d change: the wind; and the location. For me, the biggest disadvantage of Wellington is that stretch of wild water between us and the South Island: if only the geography were different and Wellington were on the other side of Cook Strait (let’s get rid the faultline while we’re at it, eh?). Then I could easily get to my other land-of-the-heart in Central Otago a bit more often.

But I suppose when the pull gets too strong I can always go to the South Coast and view the mountains over the water. And although the wind can be a bit wearing sometimes, no-one can argue with a sunny day in Wellington, and there’s lots of those.

So here I am.

• Llew at Sunnyo
• Martha at Wanda Harland
• Mike at MiramarMike
• Ben at ben.run
• Make Tea Not War (I could not find Ms MTNW’s name :-)
• Sibylle at heimatseeker
• Mr Reasonable at Whispering Inferno
• Lisa at rat pony
• Jessie in The Backyard

Something inside is singing.

The southerly is cold on my face here at 2,000 feet, but the sun, when it appears, is hot on my neck and head. I’m looking down and away across a broad valley that cuts through the farm.

Seagulls bicker in the shadow of the broken dam the Chinese gold miners made. A hawk does lazy spirals, just a dark speck visible against a far ridge. Somewhere unseen, a falcon stoops, its ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki-ki drifting up from from the rocky bluffs by the creek far below.

Further away, a shower of rain crosses the distant ranges and the sun illuminates the rain clouds like some Turner painting.

Under my feet, the grass, sown by my father and brother where once the snow tussocks were taller than men. (The previous paddock over was partly mine, just a little: I harrowed it on an old Case crawler tractor, slow and dusty, one Varsity holiday.) Ryegrass and clover, now making fat lambs. They’ve scattered from the farm truck, but will return from the dark gullies after we leave.

Across the creek, my brother is breaking in more ground, greenery spreading up the hill but only to a certain altitude. Flat ridges end in deep narrow gullies full of scrub, concealing the occasional pig and deer. Beyond that, many thousands of acres of wide open tussock country, where the only sounds are the skylarks and the gentle sussurration of the tussocks themselves.

Moments like this bring me to appreciate the idea (if I may appropriate it) of tūrangawaewae: a place to belong to; a place where the land owns you rather than you own the land. This is how I feel. I remain a farmer’s son, sometimes.

I hope I always have this place to come to.

I’m taunted by the gorse, whose yellow flowers attract a dose of Vigilant but always seem to reappear somewhere else next year. And for good measure seed in our lawn just when you least expect it (e.g., when you’ve been digging the garden and you’d like to have a little sit down and breather for a couple minutes).

I’m taunted by our unkempt rose bushes, whose spindly and unstable canes always seem to be reaching out to scratch and tear. Sometimes I’d like to tear them out, but before I’ll get around to it they’ll bloom.

I’m taunted by the convolvulus, whose white roots turn up everywhere. Even an obsessional devotion to digging these out never seems to completely solve the problem.

I’m taunted by the wandering willy, which has emerged from under the lemon trees and decided the freshly turned vege patch with it’s soft dark dirt is fair game for lebensraum. And the fennel. And the blackberry.

I’m taunted by the neighbourhood cats, who have decided that the freshly turned vege patch with it’s soft dark dirt is fair game for taking a shit in. A tazer would be handy for this, wouldn’t it.

I’m taunted by the neighbourhood rats, who have decided that if I am to destroy their living quarters they’ll come and live in ours. As I sit here I can hear them scampering across the ceiling.

I’m doubly taunted by the neighbourhood rats, who still get their free lunches from our compost bin. I trapped one in there today, and threw a brick at it, missing of course. And then I had to think very carefully about reaching in to retrieve the brick.

And I’m taunted by our lawns, whose growth, somewhat reminiscent of tropical elephant grass, nearly defeated the petrol line trimmer this afternoon. There was absolutely no point taking a mower to it.

All in all, I’m thinking a fully laden concrete mixer would be of assistance right now. Or at least it would be if it were possible to get the concrete to our house without the aid of a helicopter.

Oh well, dreams are free.

This is not a political blog. Occasionally I’ll say things in passing that reflect a fairly unformed but liberal view of the world. But it’s not really something that I want to be the focus of this blog. And then who’d want to express any opinion of a vaguely left-ish persuasion given the rabid, slavering nature of the Instapundit echo-chamber that is the right-wing blogosphere?

But some things do bestir the political conscience. Like the case of Ahmed Zaoui.

Tonight’s Insight program on TVOne confirmed the suspicions I’ve had for a long time now, that Ahmed Zaoui should not be in prison; he’s not a threat to this country; and that he and his family should be allowed residence here as refugees. There’s some general information on this case here, and No Right Turn keeps a good and lucid watching brief on what’s happening.

But basically Zaoui is a man banged up without trial on secret evidence provided by the SIS that cannot be made public, evidence that many reasonable people refuse to believe exists. This is not New Zealand, surely…?

I think the Zaoui case is a test of our fortitude as a democracy. Are we the kind of democratic nation that shoots itself in the head at the first hint of an external threat? Or can we assess; decide; and act for ourselves in the open, and in the light of day?

One of the rules I’ve invented for myself is this:

That first day after a bout of the flu in which you finally feel up to going to work? Don’t. Stay at home. Your body is deluding you, and you will not be ready until tomorrow.

So that’s why I’m at home today. The only thing to miss about work is the heating. Through the wonder that is Terminal Services, I can access my work desktop and assuage any vestigial sense of protestant guilt by reading my emails and generally pretending to some kind of “work”. And there’s no possibility of an afternoon nap at work - it’s very uncomfortable under my desk.

On the other hand, the girls and R. have gone to their grandparents for the rest of the school holidays, so it’s very quiet here. No excuses for not being productive, then.

Meanwhile, the wind has switched to the south and between it and the rain is causing a sweetly tragic shower of cherry blossom on to our unkempt lawn. The tui don’t mind though - they are living it large at the moment and even in this foul weather there is almost always one or two in the cherry tree bustling about. It’s very cheering.

And I might put the fire on. That will help too.

Apparently Internet spam is ten years old. This made me realise that I’ve been using the Internet for ten years.

I received my first Internet email message on the 23rd of February 1994. (Sadly, I still have it.) I was working in Parliament with a gregarious cockney bloke (a great guy who has since become a minor public figure in the bureaucracy) who’d convinced one of the CRIs that we needed our own Internet connected PC. I’d been brainwashed by Wired Magazine for much of 1993 and was dead keen on the idea as well. It was all set up for us, and eventually (for these things took time in those days) we were connected.

That first email message, of course, just said “Test”. Not much of a Come here, Watson moment, I’m afraid.

The web was then in its infancy and the office budget didn’t stretch to a machine that could run windows and thus graphical browsers. So I got onto Usenet - pretty much the best game in town then - and arrived just in time to witness the infamous Canter & Siegel Green Card message, the event regarded as the first ever spam.

The other big event on the Internet, in early April 1994, was the death of Kurt Cobain. This was the first time I started to realise the enormous socially connective power of the Internet. The newsgroup alt.music.alternative became swamped with messages of mourning, loss, humour, hatred, incomprehension and disregard as people came together to relate their take on Cobain’s death. It was huge: thousands of argumentative music geeks in the same virtual place. And I’m not explaining the effect of it well. Over time the Internet has become commonplace and normalised - it’s hard for me to remember just how mindblowing it was back then.

Ten years later, the thing that was not much more than my hobby has become a career. And that’s probably the best kind to have. I’m a hell of a lucky guy.

What is this?

Is it fetish porn for bored dairy farmers? Is it a teenage boy’s mammarian fantasy doubled?

I spotted one fly-posted outside work yesterday and thought it was some sort of surrealist art-prank. But no. It’s a picture billboard campaign poster for MAdGE, or Mothers Against Genetic Engineering, a group of slightly batty middle-class mothers lead by ex-Thompson Twin Alannah Currie. They are combating the lifting of the moratorium on the release of genetically engineered organisms in New Zealand through a series of mildly bizarre publicity stunts (their most notable earlier success was in flashing their bras at MPs in parliament).

According to this morning’s paper, the billboard was designed to “spark debate about genetic engineering and to protest about designer milk”. There’s more to be found in the original press release, including a truly daft rant entitled “Mothers, Milk, and Cows”.

I have a lot of sympathy for their aims - I’m pretty sure New Zealand would be better off going GE-Free while we still have a chance of making it happen. But I’m not sure if this poster communicates exactly what MAdGE intended. Judging by this thread at Metafilter and other posts around the blogosphere I’m not the only one.

Holidays in the Axis of Evil: another very interesting episode this evening as a ballsy British bloke Ben Anderson and his producer make a camcorder documentary in Iraq.

The bit that stuck most in my mind was the unbelievably beautiful mosque / tomb of Imam Abi Abdillah al-Husain in the city of Karbala, all tiles and colour. I looked at it and wanted to visit it, like any tourist. Then, quarter of an hour later on the same channel the news showed some American Marines backing off from an angry crowd determined to prevent the soldiers reaching that same holy site.

It was a strange moment where my comfortable travel porn was beginning to be interrupted by reality: armchair travel (see nice and interesting things, lovely hospitable people and their children) meets current affairs (see those same lovely things get shot at and people and their children shredded by cluster bombs).

We don’t have the television on very much anymore for that very reason - it’s just too upsetting. The deaths of children in particular make me feel almost physically sickened - with a small one of our own there is very little emotional distance to be had.

Anyway, the documentary did made me think that there’s more hope for Iraq than for North Korea (shown last week): the obvious wealth of the country in resources and human talent will enable it to find its own peace (if it is allowed to by its “liberators”). Even so, the key must be to finish the war quickly, and with the least bloodshed possible. (But why now, and why Iraq? I still don’t understand.)

And on that rather lame and muddled note, I shall close.

This is the best bit of the train journey from Wellington to Masterton. After an endless 10 minutes in the tunnel under the Rimutakas and a short run through a wooded valley the scene opens up. I take a deep breath and with a small feeling of joy look out the window.

The wide open spaces are cool relief after the claustrophobic urban landscapes of Wellington and the Hutt Valley. Open country interspersed with trees down to Lake Wairarapa with the hills in the background.

It’s one of those homecoming moments in a journey - like the bend in the road at Island Block on Highway 8 where my Parents' farm can be seen for the first time, or that high point on Highway 50 between Tikokino and Maraekakaho where the full expanse of the Heretaunga plains suddenly comes in to view, or coming out of the Ngauranga Gorge on the motorway and seeing Wellington on a sunny blue day.

Yeah, that sort of thing.

In 1989 I was in Japan for six weeks or so on an exchange trip. During that time I discovered NHK’s live coverage of a sumo tournament (or basho), and I was quickly transfixed.

Over the course of the basho I became more and more involved. There is something elemental about sumo - like the Pauli Exclusion principle (using my science background there!), no two sumo wrestlers (or rikishi) may occupy the same ring at the same time. It’s as simple as that.

And yet it’s not. There is so much history, religious ritual and culture involved; it almost seems in some senses a microcosm of Japanese culture. There are also the people involved, the different styles of attack, sizes and strengths. When I first watched my favourite was Chiyonofuji, the best grand champion (yokozuna) of the last 20 years; his staredowns were legendary and allied with huge strength and technique. My other favourite was Konishiki, the largest rikishi ever, a Hawaiian directly challenging the Japanese in their semi-sacred national sport.

But the one I liked best, was Mainoumi. He was the smallest, and most tricksy of all the top rikishi. (As a comparison, Mainoumi is 173cm tall and when fighting weighed 98 kg, whereas the aforementioned Konishiki weighed in at 275kg and is 185cm tall!). He was famous for being able to beat even the biggest champion on the good day, by using the most outrageous moves. Because his size made him more manouverable, he could often quickly slip around the back of an opposing rikishi and let the lumbering behemoth’s own momentum complete the job.

His life story is also pretty interesting. Mainoumi (born Nagao Shuhei), while a good sumo wrestler at college level, never believed he would go further and become a professional. Masumi Abe, one of the “gurus” of the sumo mailing list, continues (my editorial insertions in square brackets):

“… Mainoumi (Nagao when he was in college) [was] determined to get into Ozumo. According to his story, while Nagao was in Nichidai [Nihon University in Tokyo], high school national champion Narita from the same town came to Nichidai. Nagao decided to help Narita becoming the best rikishi he can be and treated him just like his own brother. Nagao took care of Narita. Many expected Narita to be a national champion of the future, and makuuchi [high ranking] rikishi after his graduation. Then suddenly Narita died (I don’t remember what exactly happened to him). It was Nagao’s senior year. Nagao was disappointed and disgusted with his close friend’s death. He skipped sumo practice. After many days of thinking about his future, (he was to teach at a high school after graduation), he recognized how short his life could be. Nagao wanted to try what he really want to try, that was Ozumo. Mainoumi said if he did not have experienced Narita’s death, he would be just a teacher teaching social study at a high school near his home town in Aomori.”

Unfortunately, although he had the talent, Mainoumi lacked the physical size to join the ranks of the professionals - he was several centimeters below the minimum height required. In order for him to meet the requirement he had a silicon implant inserted in his scalp. Abe-san says:

“According to Mainoumi, his head was all bloody after the operation and after taking silicon out. He needed to play sumo with bloody head. In his case, a medical practitioner put a bag between the head skin and the skull. As soon as the operated opening of skin closed (more-or-less, because of lack of the time), the health practitioner put silicon small amount at a time, and gradually increase the amount. Since the silicon give pressure between the skull and the skin, it caused the further tension to pull the skin off the skull. Mainoumi said he constantly vomit because of the pain. His friends from college (Nichidai Sumo Team) helped during the difficult time, and keeping the wound clean with towels and the towels getting all bloody because of the unhealed wound on top of the head.
“It is sickening even in just listening to Mainoumi’s story.”

The Kyokai has since banned the use of such prosthetics.

Then, in July 1996 he suffered a terrible, almost farcical injury during a bout with the largest rikishi Konishiki. He had already managed to beat Konishiki, but as Konishiki fell he trapped and twisted Mainoumi’s leg, tearing a ligament. A rikishi injured must start in the lower ranks, and work up again. It took him until May 1997 to secure his place in the top rankings again. If you’ve ever seen pictures of Konishiki you would understand why the injury was so serious.

In late 1997 Mainoumi got married. One interesting news report of the time said that he had a good chance to marry the daughter of his stable boss (or oyakata). Instead, he married a nightclub manager, and thus (apparently) gave up his chances of becoming oyakata of his current stable (or heya). As his particular heya, the Dewanoumi heya, is one of the largest and most prestigious, traditionally the Dewanoumi oyakata becomes head of the Sumo Kyokai. Mainoumi gave up a lot for love, said the article, and it went on to praise this as a brave move. It’s hard to imagine this sort of bizarre thing in any other sport. In sumo, after a while, it seems to make sense.

So why was I so interested in Mainoumi in particular? If you had ever seen him fight you would know the answer. Perhaps also I saw him as being similar to me - at least in height and age, anyway. Little else was similar.

Oh, and one last thing. “Gambatte!” means “Go!” or “Get up and Fight!”. I once had plans of getting to the stadium in Tokyo, and yelling “Gambatte Mainoumi!!”. Unfortunately, by the time I get there it will have been years since his retirement. (Life’s like that sometimes.)

Note: this page was originally created for a university assignment (“Create a home page!") and has survived, in various incarnations, on my website ever since. The posting date is the date the assignment was due, back in 1998. Originally it was split over four smaller pages with a video… but as no-one can play RealPlayer anymore I’ve taken the video out.

I think that dry stone walls are one of the most charming features of the British countryside. These are walls made completely without cement or mortar, just using the skill and eye of the waller in placing the rocks so that their own weight binds them together. R. and I were in the UK for a year or so a while back, and in our travels around Britain we would often stop to take photos and look at how they might have been constructed. Most of the ones you see in the North of England are up to 250 years old dating from the time of the enclosures (in the South people grew hedges instead). But there are other examples that are much much older still. It is a very old craft.

Building a wall

In fact, I liked walls so much I decided to go on a walling course not long before I left the UK in 1997. As it was near the end of the summer I had a few problems finding one that suited; but eventually one Friday night I ended up in Littleborough (near Manchester).

The next morning I found my way up onto the moor and the site of the course (using a trusty OS Map, of course). The tutor explained the basics. I found out the rather depressing news that the standard Pennine Wall, the kind we would be building over the next two days, uses approximately a tonne of rock per metre of length. As I had been doing a typical soft southerner’s office job in London, I knew at once that I was going to have an interesting time.

Above (Dry Stone Wall in progress: 1) you can see the base laid; note the two parallel lines of stone.The Pennine Wall is built double, with some ‘through-stones’ later on.

You can now (Dry Stone Wall in progress: 2) clearly see the through-stones at this stage. These help to bind both sides of the wall together.

And now (Dry Stone Wall in progress: 3) you can see we’ve started putting the cope-stones in on the wall end closest to us. These lock together to (hopefully) stop stock from knocking the wall over. Plus they look good too.

It was much harder work than I expected, but it was good to see the results. I learnt quite a lot… but one of the biggest lessons was that I’m simply not built for moving tons of rock about professionally. I’d like to have a go in the back garden one day though (although maybe Wellington is not the best place for this).

Some interesting examples

R. and I lived in the UK for 18 months or so in 1996 and 1997. That’s when I became interested in Dry Stone Walls… and I would often take pictures when I could. Here are a few of the more interesting ones.

Tintagel, Cornwall, England, Easter 1997.

This is a brilliant example of a peculiarly Cornish style of walls - in slate areas this method had to be used as the slate doesn’t bear weight very well at right angles to its grain. So instead the weight is transferred down more with the grain than against it. Looks very good as well.

Ungeshader, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, May 1997.

This is a very good example of a skilled craftsperson’s work. Although the rock is of reasonably variable sizes and shapes (contrast this with the rock in the Littleborough pictures) whoever did this has managed to work with it to a beautiful result.

Doune Carloway, Isle of Lewis, Scotland, May 1997.

Now this really is a wonder; it’s the remains of an ancient fort. I later wrote up a diary of this particular trip, and this what I had to say about the broch:

“[It] is the best example surviving of many hundreds of such fortifications in Scotland’s north and west dating from around the first century AD and one theory suggests that the brochs were built to repel Roman slave raiders. It sits on a ridge overlooking the sea: it’s about 40 feet tall, and about 50 feet in diameter; the entrance is a very low doorway. It was extremely cunningly constructed: two tapered drystone walls, one inside the other, with flat supporting stones running through both walls arranged in a spiral pattern up the tower so that defenders could quickly climb to the top whilst inside the walls. It used to be about 40 feet tall right around, but now there’s only about half of it left, a large diagonal bite having been taken from it. The outer walls have a perfect and steep slope, with very few gaps for fingers. There’s a story about how the MacAuleys got revenge on a Morrison cattle-raiding party: a MacAuley climbed the outside of the broch using a pair of knives; in his teeth he held a burning torch. Once at the top he set fire to the thatched roof hiding the Morrison party and burnt them out.”

Loch Risay, Island of Great Bernera, Scotland, May 1997.

Well, I really can’t say enough about this. Within line of sight of the Carloway Broch over the water, I actually think that this is worth at least one Cathedral. It is definitely one of the most amazing things I’ve seen on my travels. Here’s the story from my diary again:

“While in the [Great Bernera] museum I had read of an enterprising Bernera man in the 1860s who engineered a solution to another local problem. In high summer the lobsters [Bernera’s main industry] were at their most plentiful around Bernera; but because of the warmth and the distance to market it was not worth trying to export them. Before leaving for Australia to make some money, he marked out a site beside a narrow bay of Loch Risay. When he returned five years later, he used his money to build a dry stone wall right across the bay, cutting it off from the sea. The tide was able to run through the stone wall, aerating the water, but anything within could not escape. Now, he could store the lobsters caught during the good weather of summer and sell them later when the market had picked up in the autumn. He could even supply them out of season, during the winter.”

The archetype of Scots canniness, eh?! So I decided to go and have a look - it took a bit to find, and a long walk around a deeply indented bay of the sea, but I got there eventually:

“The wall must have been 20 feet at its deepest and was a good three feet wide all along the top. Large flat stones had been placed on top, so I walked across into the middle: I had read in the museum of people mooring their boats here and kids fishing from it, so I guessed it would be fairly safe. The incoming tide was about 2 feet higher on the outside and gushing through the many small gaps in the wall. It was, without a doubt, the coolest man-made thing I had seen in the islands: I sat on the edge with my feet over the water and spared a thought for the builder. People said he was mad, wasting his money, that it would never work. But he laughed all the way to the bank, and the loch continued to be used right up into the 1930s. Besides being a canny businessman, he was also a scientist on the side: his lobsters started breeding in the loch, and his observations of their life-cycle were the first ever made.”

Maybe you had to be there. But I’m glad I went off the beaten track to find it. I often wonder if the English wallers know of its existence.

Note: this page was originally created for a university assignment (“Create a home page!") and has survived, in various incarnations, on my website ever since. The posting date is the date the assignment was due, back in 1998. Originally it was split over two smaller pages. This was all pre-digital, so at some point I need to find the original prints and re-scan them at a better resolution.