Posts by Andre Alessi
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I used to be terrified of speaking to anyone I didn't know. Actual shaking-in-my-boots terrified. Thankfully the Internet helped me get over that little hump in the road towards becoming a functioning social human being-ville.
It is funny though, as kids we're warned off speaking to strangers, and many of us carry that taboo with us into adulthood for entirely the wrong reasons.
Tangental to this, I read Haley Campbell's " A N O P E N L E T T E R T O T H E G U Y W A I T I N G I N T H E C O R N E R O F T H I S C O M I C B O O K S H O P" yesterday and thought very much about exactly these issues. How hard is it to remember the golden rule of social interaction with strangers: it's enjoyable if it's not creepy?
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All in all, I had a pretty good night-didn't watch the game, stayed on the Shore and watched the fireworks from Mt Victoria. It felt like a pleasant night was had by all.
I'm confused by the focus on the mishaps with the trains, though. Yes, there does need to be an investigation because these aren't new issues, only issues occurring on a greater scale. But the fact that both ferries and buses from the Shore to the city were suspended for a while seems to have rated scarcely a mention, as is the fact that buses were also overloaded and not picking up passengers.
I left work at 4:30 pm (I would have loved to have left earlier, but my boss was having none of it) and spent more than two hours struggling to get back home via bus along Lake Rd, which was gridlocked-by private cars, not buses-for hours. Had I decided to take up a friend on their invitation and meet them for dinner in Grey Lynn instead, it would certainly have taken much longer than that to get anywhere. None of this is acceptable, yet the focus on trains means we'll probably just have a shrug and a grin from the usual suspects, instead of a serious investigation into why our city's infrastructure broke down and stopped doing what it was supposed to do.
I mean, it's not as though TPTB can claim they didn't know that the RWC was on, right?
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Hard News: Te Qaeda and the God Squad, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I wonder does someone (some foreign entity) have a fibre splitter in our main fibre trunks somewhere?
It might still be an effective monopoly here, but it's an open enough network that it is vanishingly unlikely for someone to be able to hide that kind of equipment on the network. Too many people have access to the entirety of the network (including the backbone) and virtually none of them have an interest in keeping quiet about that sort of equipment should they come across it.
Which isn't to say that there aren't other ways of spying on the network, and the Telecommunications (Interception Capability) Act 2004 requires that network operators build some kind of monitoring equipment into their network, but as a rule of thumb the stuff that's out there is pretty rudimentary (mainly because the Act is so vague on technical details.) In practice, the Privacy Act is a pretty good buffer against "fishing expeditions".
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I was in my second or third year of university and living in a flat off Dominion Rd. I had decided to skip my morning classes for a sleep in, turned on the TV (I didn’t have a computer of my own back then) and spent the rest of the day sitting in my pajamas on the couch, watching the screen in mute shock. I don’t remember seeing my flatmates at all that day-they all worked or studied, but I’m sure we must’ve seen each other at some point?
I went in to class the next day, and it was all anyone was talking about. Even the lecturers were ready to drop everything and sit around discussing what had happened with us. Right before a social psychology class, I remember discussing what had happened with a friend, a mature student in his thirties, who was generally quite a liberal guy. When I told him I had sat at home watching the TV and crying, his reaction was “Why?”, as if feeling overwhelmed by the human impact of events, the human cost, was somehow incomprehensible. He made a comment about Americans “deserving everything they got.”
That attitude shook me and, I suppose, made me aware of a genuine undercurrent of anti-Americanism I’d never noticed before in some parts of New Zealand culture. In the years that followed, it was a hard thing sometimes, being honest about the history leading up to the attacks and watching the redirection of the tragedy of the day into self-serving political symbolism, and yet frequently finding myself on the “side” of people who thought this argument was about justice and collective punishment being visited upon America and individual Americans.
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I've never been to Christchurch, neither Christchurch-That-Was nor Christchurch-Now, so my understanding of the impact of the earthquake is horrifically abstract. But I'm reminded daily of the scope of what happened through work-hearing, for example, that we can't send a technician in to an area for at least another year on instructions from the council (from today), or speaking to business owners who have only just found new premises to move in to, or coming across now quite matter-of-fact comments like "We can't reach that part of the network, it's on a street that no longer exists."
It's clear that this is something that isn't just going to go away, and I'm constantly surprised and amazed at how people like yourselves, Emma and Lucy and co, have managed to find a new normal inside a situation I can't even hope to imagine.
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Hard News: Just don't call it "Party Central", in reply to Sacha,
Your suburban loyalty is touching
It's not a "suburb", it's a way of life thinly disguised as overpriced real estate.
I’ve been thinking of starting some sort of illegal betting syndicate in Devonport based on the Kea being in or out of service. I’d clean up, even without a few dodgy backhanders to the Fuller’s mechanics.
Every time my overseas relatives visit, the Kea inevitably breaks down with them on it and has to be subbed out. I would clean up.
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David Slack mentioned this the other day on Twitter, but I think it’s something that bears keeping in mind:
Question for Fullers – Jet Raider out of service getting new engine, Kea MIA. How’s that RWC capacity looking?
(For those not Devonport-based, the Jet Raider and the Kea are the two largest Devonport-to-Auckland City ferries. The remaining ferries have significantly less capacity and take longer to load/unload.)
This could be interesting in terms of logistics, because most tourists aren’t going to wait an hour or two to travel to Devonport, nor are they going to go the long way ’round over the Harbour Bridge and through Takapuna.
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Clearly, the pool of experienced hospitality staff is not all that deep.
On the contrary, there are more experiences hospo staff in Auckland than you can shake your largest stick at, myself included. But most bail from the industry after realising we can make twice as much money in a job with regular hours, fewer drunks, and more corporate health insurance plans. Even with the RWC, hourly rates in hospo are terrible and not likely to last much beyond October-there are plenty of places offering $13-14 an hour, which is not likely to bring anyone over the age of 20 out of the woodwork.
On the night we were there, people were walking up and down looking for somewhere to buy cigarettes, which there wasn’t. There’s no after-dark retail at all.
The development of that whole area has been a very rushed job. Some retail stores are trying to set up only to find no telcomms network into their building at all, so Eftpos, phones and internet are all off the menu. The only way to get network in is to dig up the roads, drill through concrete walls, etc and getting council permission to perform that kind of work before the RWC (a Road Opening Notice usually takes 2-6 weeks of negotiation and planning, for example) is virtually impossible.
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Field Theory: How's that working out for…, in reply to Hadyn Green,
Possibly the most controversial comment posted in this thread: Yachting is totally a sport.
Ballroom dancing is a sport too. Sometimes you just have to admit that nothing makes sense.
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Hard News: When the Weather is the News, in reply to 3410,
Meanwhile, workers at KFC, Pizza Hut and Starbucks get told “you have no job when it snows”.
Business continuity planning in New Zealand in regards to staff support tends to be along the lines of "What can we get away with?" It won't just be the big companies trying this, but they are the ones that should get most of the flack for it.
If a company hears that a staff member can't make it to work via their normal travel methods, the company should be offering to arrange transport, not penalising the workers.