crazyscot

Monday. We were up at what passed for a sensible time (6am local, 9am NZ) for our 0710 pick-up for the day's activity, the Reef Experience tour. This is a close-up Great Barrier Reef experience, with snorkelling and - for those who wish it (we didn't) - an introductory scuba dive. ( Photos within )

Let's face it, getting up at 3am for a 6:30 flight was never going to be pleasant. We parked in the Christchurch Airport long-stay; the path took us through the end of the terminal building where they don't mind people "resting" overnight. As it was well before dawn, it was a slightly surreal experience to witness this room of people apparently openly sleeping.

( Australia day 0. Light on the photos and probably not of much interest. )

I haven't made much progress with writing up or uploading photos from Aus, but there's a good reason for it... No sooner had I got home, than I went off haring round the A&P show on Friday, then have spent this weekend in Wellington for a conference. Work have indicated that I can have a couple of days off in lieu as they're happy to count it as personal development time, and I'm hoping that they'll let me take it this week because I am shattered.

In the meantime, in the interests of not letting my backlog get any bigger, here are a couple of snaps I took this evening in WLG airport.

The bag belt is dressed up to look like Hobbiton, and has signs talking of bags going on adventure.


This creepy giant Gollum lurks above the main concourse, seemingly unaware of the tasty delights on sale nearby:

We are home after a few days in Queensland.

Headlines: Hot. Sticky. Exhausting. Breathtaking (in at least three ways). It was cloudy for the total eclipse, but cleared up just enough that we saw it.

More to follow, but it won't be tonight. In the meantime, have a teaser photo...

Not much to report, so have a link to the new Air NZ safety video. It's titled "An Unexpected Briefing", Weta Workshop were heavily involved, and it features cameos by Sir Peter Jackson and Gollum... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBlRbrB_Gnc

From time to time I contemplate the notion of a tablet PC of some sort. Yes, yes, I know, Apple's offerings positively exude a level three glamour, but I do hear rumours of people out there who do serious useful stuff with them. As a tool for getting things done, in other words - not just a plaything. But Apple's blurb proclaims there to be over 250,000 apps in the App Store. Right. How on earth am I expected to navigate that?

Of course there is the other option, of a much cheaper Android device, but there is such a profusion of devices to choose from, and no single unified App Store, making the problem much worse. (Side note: commodity hardware is dead.)

What, dear readers, might I do with such a device? What do those of you who have them do? (I also have some notes from folk at work.)

There is also the question of 3G or not. My lifestyle doesn't currently put me in situations where I think "hey, if I had 3G and a tablet right now I could do X", so I don't see much utility in paying the extra - but of course this is a chicken and egg situation. What can I do with a 3G device that's useful, cool or both? I appreciate that you can't answer for me, but you can at least tell me about cool stuff that you'd do, which is hopefully going to give me ideas...

(Side note: I have a PAYG 3G stick; I don't currently see the benefit of a 3G subscription. Casual data is eye-bleedingly expensive here. The least awful rate I have found is with Telecom NZ, who charge $1 for the first 10MB in any 24 hour period, then $1 per MB after that; and if you go a-roaming, then (in most parts of the world) thirty bucks per MB is what they will be a-charging. If RevK is reading this paragraph, he's probably had kittens by now and/or spotted a market ripe for exploitation. But griping about mobile data rates is not (really) the purpose of this post.)

Trying out my solar filter.

I just received a letter from my old car insurers in the UK. You know, the policy I cancelled in June last year when I emigrated. They refunded me a portion of the premium at the time; fair enough.



Attached to the letter was a cheque for £47.66. Um, guys, you know I'm in NZ; how do you expect me to cash this? Barclays' own website has a gazetteer that knows about a non-trivial number of places in NZ, which helpfully tells me that my nearest branch is some 11464 miles away, in Aberdeen of all places :-). And, of course, BNZ want $$$ to cash a foreign cheque.

Having run the numbers I agree with the original value of their refund and was not expecting any more; by their own terms they said they would charge £47.50 if the policy was cancelled during its term, which they did. WTF is going on? Is there some rash of unfair contract terms cases going on in the UK at the moment?

More seriously, can I ask a favour - would somebody for whom a Barclays branch is convenient be able to pay in this cheque for me?

Leaving work last night, I remarked to a colleague that the world looked wrong. By that, I mean the colours were wrong. The sun was nearly setting, but its golden glow was somehow reflecting off a monstrous thundercloud looming to the south. It was the golden hour, but applied to everything that I was expecting to be in shade.

As I drove to meet rustica there was lots of lightning, though it was too far away to hear the thunder.

By the time we got home I went to unplug the sensitive electronic kit around the house, then we stood out for a while hoping to be able to photograph it. Alas, none of the shots were any good. Then came was this sudden roaring sound, which we took as our cue to take shelter... it was hail. I think it was the largest hail I've ever seen. I photographed them with a 50c coin for scale, which is pretty much the same size as a 10p piece. It wasn't a huge dump; we must have only caught the edge of the storm, because there were reports of golf ball sized hail over in Addington and Papanui (3-4km away) breaking conservatory roofs...!

http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/your-weather/7612215/Lightning-lights-Christchurch-sky has some decent photos. Poignantly, it was the second anniversary of the September 2010 quake which kicked off all that fun and games.

After it passed, I plugged things back in, and found that (long story short) the DSL modem was fried. Can't say I'm that surprised, really, so I picked up a new one today. The replacement has a web interface which requires me to solve a captcha to log in, even on the LAN side. I'm not sure what I think of this.

On the other hand, I now have some more dead tech kit that I can rip apart and turn into paperweights :-)

Ebay have US$2.35 of my money, being a promotional credit for sellers fees from about 9 years ago (thanks to their screwball accounting at the time, they then started charged me in sterling and wouldn't offset them against the US$ positive balance). I got round to asking them how they might get it back to me. They had a credit card number from me back at that time, but (as well as being years expired) the account has been sold on to another bank and the card number completely changed. They can't pay me by BACS, all they will do is take an IBAN and SWIFTBIC and pay me that way. Apparently they are prepared to do this despite the small sum involved.

So obviously I have missed something and this isn't automatically a bad idea due to telegraphic transfer fees and suchlike. Perhaps it's because of the existence of eBay S.à r.l. who are based in Luxembourg, and hence able to make a relatively inexpensive payment via the European financial networks.

I have some (admittedly wobbly) hopes that the Right Thing will happen here, at least in principle. How much money, and in what currency, will eventually reach my UK account? If not in pounds, how dreadful a conversion rate will Barclays apply? Will the Eurozone crash meantime and render the payment worthless? Will the charges turn out to be a loophole that remotely sucks money out of my account? Place bets now!