Audent’s Weblog

Is this the wettest drought on record? How can we be conserving power because our hydro lakes (and are there any other kind?) are too low when it hasn’t stopped raining for days.

Days!

What’s that all about?

So I’ve been and gone and done it. Got my motorbike licence, that is.

Well, not entirely.

You see, I have a 50cc Hyosung Fast 50 (soon to be flogged off on TradeMe for $500. Any takers?).

I’ve enjoyed the Hyosung. It’s a nice bike, does the job. Revs well, scoots along but just doesn’t quite keep me as safe as I’d like.

There’s something about being at full throttle all the time that’s not very good. If a car pulls out (or in, or over, or does … anything at all) your only option is to slap on the anchors and hope you stop in time.

That’s not pretty.

The other option is to upgrade to a bigger, more powerful Beast and so have the option to either brake or accelerate. However, in NZ if you want a bigger bike (bigger than 2kW that is) you need a bike licence.

The process for this is … well, a little strange.

Before you even sit on a bike, you need to do a practical.

Yes, you read that right. Before you can get a beginner’s licence to learn how to ride you have to … learn how to ride.

Interesting.

So anyway, I can ride. I have my Hyosung. So off I went to get my practical basic handling certificate which involves riding a bike around a series of cones, proving you can stop on command, ride slowly and ride round a curve.

This I did - except the cones… There’s something about tiny wheels on a tiny scooter that has quite a long body that makes it IMPOSSIBLE to go round the cones properly. Fortunately my tester understood this.

From there you take your certificate and go directly to the AA, or Mother Russia, Land of Soviet Enterprise as I like to call it.

It works like this: enter the AA at lunchtime. Chose one of about 15 nearly identical forms at random. Fill in said form. No, you cannot download the form and fill it in before venturing to the AA. You have to do it in the store.

Stand in an astonishingly long queue. Watch the big plasma TV on the wall which is showing a newsreel of headlines from (I’d say at a guess) about six months ago. Watch as it cycles through the same five pub quiz style questions. Shuffle forward as required.

Once at the desk (roughly 80 minutes later) you’re told you haven’t filled in the correct form BUT (just as the blood begins to boil and your basic urge to go postal surges to the surface) they’ll let you stand there filling in the right form.

Once you’ve filled in the form you have your photo taken. You take an eye test. You then get to chose a time for your actual test. No, you can’t do it there on the spot, you have to come back.

You pay for it in advance.

Once you’ve chosen your time, and paid your money, you’re then informed that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES can that time be changed without 48 HOURS notice. Given that I asked for a test for the next day, that’s not likely unless I invent time travel (or reinvent it. ha! take that, paradox freaks).

You’re also informed that UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES will you be allowed to sit your test should be more than two minutes late. TWO MINUTES!

So it is that early the next morning I drive my family to the library for story time and then on to the testing facility (another AA store in a dodgy part of town) where the girls wait at a caff (definitely not a cafe) while I go in to the AA, or Mother Russia, Land of Soviet Enterprise etc.

There I queue. Then I’m taken to a booth off to one side. There I’m presented with a scratch and win test paper and asked to check none of the scratchy panels have been pre-scratched. Then I’m told not to talk to anyone, answer any questions, use my mobile phone or any one of a dozen other things. Then the invigilator (no other name for her) stood behind me while I took the test.

Took about 12 minutes and had two errors. One was my own stupid fault but the other was odd. The sun is shining directly in your eyes as you drive along. To be safer do you: a, pull closer to the centre line, b: pull closer to the left line or c: turn on your headlights. I opted for pull to the left but apparently I was wrong which means it must be turn on your headlights. Weird.

From there I queued again (used to it by now) handed over my old driver’s licence and took up the temporary paper beast she handed over. A week or so later my new licence arrived and GASP it lists me as a learner. Oh well.

From there the girls took me to the scooter shop, I picked up my new MotoFino 125 in racing red (well it is the company colour) and I’m away and loving it. Not as quick off the mark as my Hyosung but I can keep up with the flow of traffic and get out of trouble far more easily. Plus the headlight is like the sun exploding in their eyes (no dipped headlight for me) and the brakes are nice and sharp.

Bliss.

This isn’t the scooter I intended to buy either. Originally I went in to talk about an ItalJet Torpedo 150 which looks great and has good reviews, but in the real world it’s huge. Much bigger than I was expecting, so I chatted to the good guys at Retro Scooter who talked me into a MotoFino and when I said yes to the 150 told me I wouldn’t need it (I don’t go on the motoroway) and would be better off with the 125 which has better gearing.

So, save money (fuel is $6 a week for me, and no charge for parking), have fun (and take control of your own life, literally) and go visit Retro Scooter in Newton Road if you need a bike. Tell them I sent you.

Firefox 3.0 has become the official single biggest download in a 24 hour period.

“The final record breaking 8,002,530 downloads for Firefox 3.0 took place in June with parties in over 25 countries”

I’ve been using FF3.0 for a while now and I’m enjoying it. Faster to load pages, easier to move around AND long extensions on XKCD. Nice.

It turns out I like TV ads.

This comes as a surprise to me because whenever the ad break comes on TV I mute it instantly.

So I guess what I’m saying is I like ads that are good ads and dislike ads that we see on TV (and can I just say I’m never taking my car to get its windscreen repaired by Midas in protest at its awful advertising).

But as much as I like a good ad, I like a good spoof even better.

and this one tickles my funny bone.

And then there’s this ad which I just plain like. I do like a good orchestra.

Enjoy

it’s Bill as well.

Now you know what it feels like, Bill. Pity you’re moving on before fixing it.

Having said that, my new PC has Vista on it and it’s fine. Sure, I’ve got 4GB of RAM which is seriously over-specc’d and I’m appalled that it would need that much to run an operating system for crying out loud, but it looks fine and doesn’t get in my way so much.

Favourite line:

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up. This site is so slow it is unusable. It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45. These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

He goes on to say how he tried to use the download page and got a full system check for his troubles. That’s something that annoyed me endlessly many years ago - Windows telling me that to secure my computer properly I needed to install Outlook Express. WTF? How is that going to make my PC more secure? I wasn’t even trying to download an email client, I was trying to get drivers for a printer at the time…

Good times, good times.

Went to see it last night with Da Niece. Very well done.

PC was always my favourite of the novels. It was the one I read first and it cemented my love of diving into the middle of a story and thrilling to hold all the threads in my mind as I sort them all out one by one. Who are these children? Why were they kings and queens of old? What’s with the lion? And so on.

There’s quite a bit of cool stuff in the movie as well. The way they transition from WWII London to Narnia is great and I’m delighted to see them arrive in the mythical land via … Cathedral Cove on the Coromandel.

I’ve long believed New Zealand is something of a mythical land but this really cements it. There’s something very cool about living in a place other citizens will look upon as being other worldly. New Zealand certainly fits that bill.

The acting is great too. The four children do very well (the kid who plays Peter is channeling Lady Diana’s hair, but that works. If William is half the king this guy is he’ll do alright. In fact, if this kid had played Anakin Skywalker, you’d really believe Darth Vadar could have grown out of him instead of that wimpy whiny little shit that he was supposed to be. Oh, so THAT’S why Anakin grows up to be Darth Vadar - scourge of the galaxy. Because Obi Wan was a bit gruff with him. Right) and the guy who played Trumpkin did very well. Some great dialogue there.

And Caspian himself... well, the role does call for a bit of a drip, but he plays it well - heart on the sleeve exactly where Caspian should be.

But the whole thing was won by Reepicheep who was, as in the books, excellent.

I wonder, given the joint directorship, who would win in a fight: Puss in Boots or Reepicheep?

The movie was, I think, stolen entirely by the CGI bear however. The little wave is … a classic of scene stealing. Not bad for a virtual actor.

Edmund was always my favourite character and I’m glad to see he gets a good run in the movie. And the lad who plays him is the great great something great grandson of Charles Darwin! OMG! STFU! etc.

That’s all I have to say really.

Well, that and this of course.

Enjoy.

(PS - Stephen Hawking rules, as do Mythbusters and Randall Munroe)

PPS - Having watched the clip about oh, a million times this morning, some things become apparent.

Firstly, the words don’t necessarily synch with what’s on the screen. For example “I love when great whites fly” is sung over pictures of an orca (which I recently discovered is a kind of dolphin not a whale at all) while De Niece tells me that’s not magma but in fact lava. Does this say something about the validity of Discovery Channel TV shows? I don’t know.

And secondly, I really don’t mind. It’s fun.

I like patterns. I love spotting patterns in things I hadn’t previously spied before.

That’s not to say I can do those 3D pictures where you stare at blotchy pages and end up saying “It’s a man, on a horse, holding a dalmatian on a leash” because I can’t. But that’s not important right now.

Instead, I’m talking about my blog. It turns out, as I’ve said before, that despite all my best efforts there’s one post that brings in the punters more than any other. Ten times more than any other post. That’s right, it’s the funny otter.

And so with pure blog post greed in mind I bring you an ad for Minnesota Zoo.

Enjoy.

Someone found this blog by searching for “old hippodrome on henblas street” so welcome, whoever you are.

Not sure what state the theatre’s in at the moment but I found Arthur’s blog with some photos and a bit of history.

I remember that part of town quite well, now I’ve thought about it a bit. There were two huge indoor markets in the area that I remember my grandma taking me to. One of her buddies worked in one of them on some stall or other and I recall spending many a lazy morning looking around the place waiting while they chatted on.

To a small boy the halls were big enough to be the biggest rooms I’d ever been in. Easily larger than a school hall, tall and airy with birds flying around and (might not be right here) beautiful plaster work around the edges (what is that, fret work? what do you call it on interiors of buildings?).

I believe they were torn down years ago but maybe someone can enlighten me.

I hope they do something with the Hippodrome. It was great fun.

Can’t live with them, not legally allowed to hunt them out of season.

Honestly, I know they have a tough job but they can make life HELLISH some days.

I think I’ve mentioned before (but I’m too lazy to look it up) about a French restaurant owner who refused to visit a doctor but who was getting progressively worse and worse (all the good things - heart, kidneys, liver, all packing up). His friends arranged some kind of Gallic equivalent of an intervention and told him they’d be back in the morning to take him to a doctor, by force if necessary.

They found him sitting in his restaurant, half a bottle of red on the table, a revolver in his hand, stone cold dead.

Probably it’s bullshit but…

Some days I think that’s the best way to treat the medical fraternity.