Rant About Interminable Roadworks Outside Our House

What follows is a summarised rant about the IMO totally unacceptable, and really poorly managed + executed + communicated roadworks outside our place, that have been going on for the past 3 months and counting now!  🤬

While I accept that roadworks sometimes have to take place, the manner in which this has whole process has taken place has been nothing short of appalling, and completely unacceptable IMO.  (It's all the more surprising, when the council had only just spent a bunch of money getting another bunch to resurface the whole road like 2 years earlier, to the point I thought that we wouldn't need any further works for another decade!)

It's also somewhat galling to finally find that the company ("Hunter Civil") who won that contract / tender, did so on a "Restricted Tender" project (i.e. the council, for all intents and purposes, could've effectively shoulder-tapped those bastards to offer them this "juicy nugget" project - covering a whole bunch of streets, over 6 months... to what extent that is / isn't true is not really something that can be easily found out just yet though - yeah, there's the LGOIA (Local Government Official Information Act) provisions for finding out such shit, but yeah... it turns out you have to pay them to hire / divert a staffer to gather that info for you... and then they charge *per page* copied in addition to their hourly rate around minimum wage-ish spent doing all that... 🙄)

 

First Impressions of New Ice Cream (Soft Serve) Machine

Tonight, I finally got around to trying out my "new" Ice Cream Machine (soft serve), having originally bought it over 1-2 years ago (i.e. it was on sale during a long weekend, and I'd always wanted a soft-serve machine).

 

Why then has it taken so long to get around to trying it?  Well, mostly being too busy to read the instructions to:

  1) set it up, 

  2) get the ingredients, 

  3) have enough time to set it all up and finally try it

This Easter weekend, I *almost* managed to do that, until I found that we didn't have Vanilla Essence (as called for by the recipe), having thought we did... Oh well! That was one of the "things not going well" that happened that weekend... 

Anyway, tonight was the night, when I finally got to see how well this worked (and/or whether I could say that it's potentially a better system than what two of my colleagues have using a different / newer machine they got at the end of last year).  (Well, on that front, I can say - yes, their one apparently is *really* noisy as it has to grind into solid-frozen ice, whereas mine churns liquids into semi-solids using a frozen bowl)...

 

A Very Good Day (for a Change)

 Today ended up turning out really nicely!  (Well, especially everything from this afternoon onwards!)  😊

* Got vaccinated for this year's COVID + Flu combo's  (**1)

* Got a bunch more cute Eugy models to put together, and the lady at the store let me grab a few of their prebuilt models for free (which was a nice surprise!) 

* The sun was out and it's warm  (25C, which was warmer + nicer than most days over the "Summer" that we've just had, where it just rained and stay in the low-mid teens)

* Managed to hear some silvereyes (going to feast in the "Autumn Birdy Berry Tree")!  (**2)

* Finally managed to try my "new" Ice Cream / Soft Serve machine - Technically I'd gotten it over a year ago, nearly 2 now, on sale one long weekend. But till now, I haven't had time to get around to investigating how to set it up, and gathering the ingredients to try making some!  (I'll have a separate post on this shortly)

All this was a very nice change + surprise, having been feeling rather err... "off" this past weekend from hardly anything going right (**3)!

 

Wordplay: Motorcycle Rallies vs Boy Racers

This morning, I watched as a large convoy of colourful motorcycles cruised past noisily. Which got me thinking:

We should be calling these motorbike rally enthusiasts "midlife / grandpa racers", as the "boy" racers apparently gather on Friday/Saturday nights at the Moorhouse Ave Countdown carpark (there was a YT short docu about this), in their four wheeled contraptions (aka: They need training wheels still! 😜)

The video in question, from "New Zealand Today" (from 3 years ago):

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BaDDQ54UftA

Excursions in Google Translated Maori: Hukarere = To Snow

TIL, from a typo'd search for what I presume was a Japanese term written out in English letters, that "hukarere" means "to snow" in Maori

https://maoridictionary.co.nz/search?&keywords=hukarere

Fascinating... according to Google translate, if I change from saying "I wish it would snow" to "I wish it would snow *again*", one of the extra words ("ano") looks awfully like something you'd hear in Japanese

(For context, I don't really know/understand Japanese, but from time to time, I have heard enough in sequence to get a feel for the patterns these days)

1) "I wish it would snow in Ōtautahi"
== "Ko taku hiahia kia hukarere i Ōtautahi"

2) "I wish it would snow again in Ōtautahi"
== "Ko taku hiahia ka heke ano i Ōtautahi"

🤓

Disclaimer: I don't know Te Reo either, so Google may have totally butchered that badly and done the equivalent of "Catmeat I eat love" here, when I meant "I like cats"

Additional Can of Worms: 

* "rere" means "to run" /  "to flow"

* "wairere" means "waterfall"

* BUT "rain" is "ua"?!  🤯

   (the pronunciation examples for that and the related terms though are pretty impossible to catch!)

Computer Hardware Adventures - Resurrecting Desktop Workstation #1

For the past year, I've been forced to use my "secondary" (+ newer) workstation, as I woke up one morning to my former primary workstation (from 2018) having a severe bout of hardware-related instability. 

Granted, this secondary workstation has actually been a vastly better machine in most regards, as it has actually been more of the setup that I'd originally been going for in 2018 (see details below).  And also, this switch has helped postpone having to address a several "storage crunch" I'd been experiencing on the primary machine  (i.e. I'd gotten to the point where my Photos/Media drive had actually *run out of space*, and I had to quickly offload as much "non-critical" stuff as I could to a mix of "other drives on the machine, for "more important" stuff, and only a secondary drive for all the "not very important" stuff)

Anyway, for "reasons", I've come to finally get around to trying to resurrect this machine now at last!  (I'd actually mean to do it by this time last year... but then procrastination over finding "the right" replacement PSU and/or trying to fit that in against work/holiday schedules has meant that this has only happened now...)

This rambling post will be about the journey of trying to get this working again, and also the upcoming challenges of figuring out how this step now fits into my grand scheme for rejigging how I run all my computing setup (i.e. both the "Linux migration" project, but also the "two workstations / two locations, one big stash of data that needs backing up and syncing") 

Lessons from Aviation - Saturday Morning Thought on AI / Automation Use

Maybe I've been looking in the wrong places, but it seems that there is not much discussion out there on how we should be looking towards the aviation industry for insights into how our relationship with automation should proceed.

After all, pilots have been dealing with "autopilot" systems for decades now!

Salient lessons I think:

* There is a general skepticism of "what the machine says" that is drilled into them from early on - Yes, many do depend on navigation systems much of the time, as they are generally reliable. But, where possible, they are reminded to look out the window / use multiple sources and confirm whether that matches what the machines say. 

On that note, a very important part of their job is to constantly monitor and track the system information, cross-checking that against their expectations. Trust but verify.

* Between that and the need for redundancy in case of failure (e.g. backup radios, backup map + light sources, backup instruments), you'll also soon find that many pilots are actually wary about night flying, where the risks are greatly heightened, as darkness makes it harder to spot deadly situations. In other words, you should be careful about putting yourself in risky situations to begin with! Manage the risky situations by avoiding in the first place

* The need for regular "stick and rudder time" - i.e. there is widespread understanding that they do need to manually exercise / practice their skills *without using the automation*, so that they remain capable of stepping in when the automation goes berserk / breaks, which *will* happen, often at the worst possible times.

* It is also heartening that while this automation has existed for decades, there has been sufficient strong advocacy for maintaining two-pilot operations to maintain human-in-the-loop operations.

20 Years and Counting as a Professional Software Engineer

Ooh... earlier today, I was suddenly reminded that this year marks 20 years since I've been developing software in a professional / semi-professional capacity (i.e. working with a medium-sized team, on an established codebase with millions of lines of code, wrangling bug trackers + wikis, and supporting software for which there are real users of the stuff we're building who depend on that to get their work done)

I started in around May 2006 (*), after managing to get Blender's code compiling on my machine at last, which enabled me to start tackling a few of my pet peeves...

It also happened that one of the first feature film productions using Blender was kicking off around that time too in Argentina (i.e. "Plumiferos" at "Manos Digitales" (sp?) IIRC), and had posted a long list of feature requests that happened to overlap with quite a few of the things on my list! In short, that's how I ended up entering the industry - burning through that feature request list, and becoming one of the major contributors to Blender for over a decade!

(*) I had actually been programming since early 2000, but had only worked on my own private "from scratch" projects up till then

Linux Migration - Current Queries Edition (March #1)

This is the latest in my ongoing series on investigating my setup for migrating to Linux. I've got 2 other posts that were supposed to go up at the start of February, but I've been procrastinating on polishing them up for posting...

In any case, today's update covers where things are at in general, and the outstanding barriers to resolve before pulling the trigger.

Opinion / Rant - Christchurch Protest Zones Ban Denied

TBH, as crude as it sounds, I *DO* support the motion to place restrictions on groups of people protesting at the Bridge of Remembrance (and a few other sensitive spots like the official quake memorial), and think that it is a terrible shame that this proposal got voted down (by such a slim margin, and from the usual suspects too)

 

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/588649/controversial-proposal-to-ban-protests-in-parts-of-christchurch-fails-to-get-off-the-ground

 

Lion Dance Bricks Builds Completed

Yay!  I finally finished my "Lion Dance Minibricks" build this afternoon (after spending the last 3 weekend afternoons working on it)!  🥳

Got this one in Vancouver last year (having originally wanted another one that I ended up having to internet order instead).

Of all these Chinese designs I've built recently, this one is perhaps the most solid + structurally sound of all of them. The only problem was trying to figure out how the layers lined up, as a few layers had lots of bricks packed into tight arrangements that it became hard to figure out which was which! 

(The problem was such that today I had to redo part of the girl's face, as I'd added the middle between-eyes chunk one row too far back!  Fortunately, the whole lion-dance head came off relatively cleanly, and apart from one or two stragglers that needed to be manually placed first, I managed to get the whole head to snap straight back on after I'd made the tweaks... not once, but twice!  Phew! Things would've been bad had I had to undo all that to get back down!) 

March Maladies Early Onset

It seems the triple malaises of early March have struck early this year

1) Cold + rainy weather

2) Kids, their parents, and "youth" in general coming down with whatever happens when loads of students suddenly reconverge in places of learning, bringing all their holiday germs into contact

3) Gridlock everywhere as the first 2 combine to result in a lot more traffic (as everyone adjusts to "the grind" again... don't worry, a lot burns off again once uni students get tired of attending class after 2-3 weeks... many to then drop out and never be seen again in tertiary study)

Stay safe out there!