aka Alfred

The Internet use of the Indian word, Avatar is rather odd. It’s been used in its current meaning for years, apparently: as far back as 1985 according to one source. But it’s appearance on Internet forums, such as myLot, is probably more recent.
For those who haven’t come across an avatar in this style, it now usually appears in the form of a picture to the side of a post (a blog post, or forum post, rather than one on the side of the road!) and is intended to convey something of the character of the person writing – this is necessary in view of the fact that in most forums anonymity is the norm, with people’s real names hidden behind user names.
MyLot’s avatars can be one of your own pictures, and for me that’s preferable to some odd cartoon, or computer-produced job. On the other hand, on another forum where I sometimes write, Paypost, you can choose your own avatar from a fairly limited selection available. The closest picture to my way of presenting myself online was Alfred, the butler to Bruce Wayne, aka Batman. Since I tend to write what might be classed as ‘stuffy’ posts, ones that try to bring some sense to posts that consist of nothing but the ‘I hate politicians’ type of nonsense, Alfred isn’t too bad an avatar. But maybe I should fool everyone and go for Bruce Wayne instead…

Thomas Merton

If you find God with great ease...perhaps it is not God that you have found.

Thomas Merton, quoted in chapter two of Reaching for the Invisible God, by Philip Yancey.

I've begun to read Yancey's book again, after having felt for some time that it wasn't his best. In fact, it's as good as most of his work; I probably wasn't in the right place to read it last time. And the fact that it's greatly about 'doubt' is very helpful to me at present, when I'm struggling with this very issue.

Links to the left of me, links to the right of me

I can’t say the Optics Planet site is the tidiest site I’ve ever visited, nor is it the most pleasantly laid out. It’s aim is to get on with the job and sell. It’s like one of the old-fashioned stores - gun shops and fishing shops still tend to go for this style - where all the stock is on display and all crammed together in as little space as possible. Fishing rods sprout like supergrass, and tackle swarms; leggings hang like dried seaweed, and there are cases and cases of flies (and sometimes a few flies with legs as well). Gunshops are a bit tidier, on average, but they usually sport enough guns to give you nightmares, and bulletsbulletsbullets and shellsshellsshells.
Optics Planet is the same: its opening page has more words per screen than anything I’ve seen in a while, and though there are pictures, they’re almost nudged off the page by more words. Practically every word is clickable – so thick on the ground are the links that you’re likely to click on Butler Creek and end up in Coronado. (Butler Creek, for those need to know these things, deal with rifle scope covers, slings, binocular straps etc – Coronado is into things telescopic.)
Optics Planet also sells atn scopes– go on, check them out! It’s a site that’ll keep you occupied all day…!
Disclosure statement

Some more on Comments

I don’t get many comments on my site, and of course they don’t appear unless you click on them. A few are relevant to the post they’re attached to; most appear suspiciously irrelevant.
Here’s one that seems like a compliment…with a sting in its tail.
"You really have some interesting stuff on your site. keep at it.xenical."
This one seems to warp off into some other space/time continuum:
"Perspectives on Crisis Vary As Worshipers Refill PewsLA PLACE, La., Sept. 11 -- Willie B. Jones couldn't contain his excitement. Standing with his wife, Loretta, at New Home Ministries, Jones was attending his first church service since Hurricane Katrina swept ...I like your blog! Hey, if you're interested in health and healthy kid snacks recipe, you might like to visit my healthy kid snacks recipe - it's all about healthy kid snacks recipe. Thanks!"
And this one is over-the-top complimentary – and has a slight brain-stop in the middle:
"Another great blog man! What a 4 you are! I couldn't derive half the fantastic ideas that you come up with.My stepping stones garden site is off topic but still noteworthy. Why aren't you in advertising or better yet a "think tank". Can you teach this kind of creative thinking? Is it something you were born with? Keep the fabulous ideas comming! [sic]"
As does this one…
"Hi, I was just blog surfing and found you! If you are interested, go see my best vitamins related site. It isnt anything special but you may still find something of interest."
And I got a whole series of this kind. Apparently private road construction is very important!
"Chinese bloggers poor, students: surveyA survey of Chinese bloggers published by Sohu.com and the Tsinghua University has found that Chinese bloggers are either poor, or students.Find out how you can buy and sell anything, like things related to private road construction on interest free credit and pay back whenever you want! Exchange FREE ads on any topic, like private road construction!"

Ian McKellan

There was Ian McKellen's playful quip during Christopher Lee's first day of filming in the Isengard gardens. In a scene later dropped from the film, Gandalf spots a couple of orcs scuttling amongst the trees. 'Orcs?' Gandalf was to have asked in astonishment. 'Servants of the Enemy in Isengard?' To which Saruman replied, 'Not his servants - mine,' a first indication that Saruman the White was not all that he seemed.

On one take, Ian revised the line to, 'Orcs? - And so far from Auckland!'

From chapter nine of Peter Jackson: A Film-Maker's Journey, by Brian Sibley.

Sullivan's Dam

It’s something like 13 or 14 years since we last went to Sullivan’s Dam (near my home town of Dunedin). I can remember that my younger son was under ten years old, and he’s now 23. As dams go, it’s nothing to write home about, being more of a small lake towards the top of Mount Cargill, with a run-off going off somewhere that we couldn’t see. But it’s surrounded by bush, there’s a pleasant track around the perimeter of the dam, and now there’s also a choice of three walks up the hill. (I discover, from Wikipedia, that it's actually what's known as a defunct dam, as is the nearby Ross Creek Reservoir.)
My wife and I opted for the shortest walk, the ten minute one, although the climb upwards felt rather longer than that. It’s been laid out with wooden ‘steps’ – steps in the sense that some of them are a metre long at least, and others are quite short. Then there are wooden squares filled with largish stones, and in some cases just plain old forest floor.
Fortunately we continued on until we got to Calvert Dell (at least I think it was Calvert, but I’m a blogger, not a reporter) and that made the trip worth doing. You reached what seemed to be a bit of a peak with the sign naming the place, and thought you were there, but more steps led down. It turned out the Dell was below where the sign was, and delightful. A lovely thin waterfall down a sheer rock above three metres high, covered in moss and ferns. At the bottom a small pool leading off to yet another little mountain stream. There was something magic about it. When I say it reminded me of something in a movie, I don’t mean to undermine the beauty of the place. It’s just that movies often capture the beauty of something like this better than I can convey in words.
On the way up the hill we were adopted by a fantail, which flickered and flittered in the branches just above our heads, obviously quite comfortable with human company. It showed its tail off frequently, as if it had nothing better to do, or, being Sunday, it thought pursuing more worksome tasks could be left for another 24 hours.

Web hosts, past and present

Cheap website sites come and go in New Zealand, and of course the same thing applies overseas. We began life on the Net with a tiny company called earthlight.co.nz which was run from a shoebox in those days (a small room under a restaurant which was called, in those days, Ruby in the Dust. Like most current restaurants/bars it’s changed its name at least once since then). earthlight had a competitor called es.co.nz (could you get a domain name much smaller than that?) which was run by a Dutchman, as I recall. earthlight and es combined or ate each other up or something, and we had an es address for some time until it, in turn, got eaten up by ihug. earthlight still exists, but the American/New Zealand family that made it have gone their separate ways. In the early days we could call them up if we ran out of time on our account, and they’d fix it over the phone. We’d then go into the shoebox and pay in hard cash the next day.

At a later point the shop I worked in had a hyper.net.nz address. hyper.net.nz was run from a bedroom – in fact, a bedroom in the flat my son was living in at the time, which is how I got to hear about it. hyper.net.nz eventually got eaten up by orcon, but again in the early days we had real hands-on support. If I had a problem, the host himself would drop everything, zip around to the shop (all of two minutes travel) and fix it on the spot.

Ah, the joys of really little hosts.

What brings all this to mind is a site I came across for cheap ecommerce hosting where you will find ‘web hosting provider companies that offer great services with budget & affordable prices, as well as Daily & Weekly expiring domain name lists that have traffic." And the prices, compared even to the best of NZ prices are pretty good: $6.95US a month and similar. That equates, at the moment, in NZ dollars to about ten dollars a month. Even with the best of companies in NZ I don’t think anyone’s quite got it down that far.

Back in the earthlight days we use to pay by the hour, believe it or not. It was a dollar an hour, if I recall. It didn’t take long to use the hour up either. The very first time we tried to go on the Net we couldn’t even get on for an hour, which was frustrating, to say the least.

I’m intrigued by the expired domain names. I guess someone has set up in great enthusiasm, and then life has gone off somewhere else, and they’ve followed, and that’s been that; one forgotten domain name. But then perhaps some people’s enthusiasms are stronger than their endurance. Here are some (sadly) forgotten domain names. Don’t they inspire?

knowyourcocktails.com
galleryofgreats.com
redveterinaria.com
flirtnet24.com

Could I really make use of any of these, especially the first and the last (although both might draw more people to my blog than my current title does!) And there were some rather more explicit ones listed as well, which might no doubt draw the crowds but might disappoint the same crowds when they arrived! LOL

Steven Johnson

The Apprentice may not be the smartest show in the history of television, but it nonetheless forces you to think while you watch it, to work through the social logic of the universe it creates on screen. And compared with The Price is Right or Webster, it’s an intellectual masterpiece.

Steven Johnson, in Everything Bad is Good for You, page 99 of the Riverhead hardcover edition.

I guess my mindset about movies is that I feel like film is a dead medium. With theatre you’ve got accidents that can happen, performances that can change. But film is a recording. So what I try to do is infuse my screenplays with enough information that upon repeated viewings you can have a different experience. Rather than the movie going linearly to one thing, and at the end telling you what the movie’s about – I try to create a conversation with the audience. I guess that’s what I’m trying to do – have a conversation with each individual member of the audience.

Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, quoted in Steven Johnson’s book, page 164.

More on Boise

Some time ago, when the Iraqi war first started, there was a briefly famous blog, called, if I remember rightly, Where is Raed? Now, rather oddly, that phrase became a kind of catch-cry around the Net when Raed himself disappeared for a few days, after having reported on life in the midst of all the bombing and fighting of the first days of the war. (Remember, those were the days when we thought it might be over in a couple of weeks.)

I can remember myself feeling some emotion about the fate of this guy, as did thousands of other bloggers around the world. Well, Raed resurfaced as good as new, and is still going strong. Raed still gives some interesting insights into life in Baghdad, as he always has done.

Which leads me in a very roundabout way to my next point. Boise again. What, that unpronounceable spot?

Yup. Boise got in the news recently for a similar reason that Raed did. Well, sort of.
Someone called Chrissy Popadics has found Internet fame not because of who she is so much as because of who she’s affianced to. (Always wanted to use that word!) Her man is the Boise State Union’s star running back Ian Johnson (of the Bronco football team). His team had a stunning win the other day, with the result that Johnson became an Internet star; that is, searches for him rose a mere 1401%. Johnson proposed to the previously unheard of Chrissy Popadics, a cheerleader for the team, at the end of the game, and the rest is history. Chrissy Popadics suddenly became a face and a name across the known world. In fact, she may have outdistanced her fiancé in the search engines.

Life in Boise is obviously never dull. In fact it’s so un-dull that people are moving there by the truckload. You wanna buy a house in that unpronounceable place? Better get in quick, because it’s a sellers’ market, and you’ll be lucky to find anything under half a million, so Boise Real Estate tells us. The picture to the side is a half a million dollar (that’s US dollars) house.

Disclosure statement

Boise - in Idaho, you know?

Boise – heck I don’t even know how to pronounce the name. There seems to be an awful lot of dispute about it, especially by outsiders. (Of which I am one.)

Boise, in Idaho, ya know? Anyway, some pronounce it boy-zee, and some boy-see. I would have took one look at it and been very Gallic and pronounced it bwahzz, but plainly I’m in the minority there.

What do I want to pronounce it for anyway? Well, it’s good to go through life saying words the way they was meant to be said, ain’t it? And who wants to be like those guys in the Bible who missed out on a few more years on the planet by getting Shibboleth wrong (or was it Shibbolet?)

In one blog I came across, there seems to be a further option to the pronunciation: Boyz. As we’re told here: "I told him I was headed to Boise City, being careful to pronounce Boise as "Boyz" as I was instructed by the manager at the KOA we stayed at previously. He gives me directions in between puffs on his cigarette. I thank him for taking the time to stop."

So there we go: four options so far. Any more on the horizon? The interesting thing about the boy-see, boy-zee thing is that we have a friend, originally from South Africa, who delights in calling her seven boys collectively by the name boys-ee. Totally irrelevant piece of information, but I thought I’d fit it in somewhere.

Teens, suicide, and safe driving

I stood outside my house with two of my neighbours the other day discussing the tragedy of teens committing suicide. Apparently there was an Internet ‘pact’ made by about twenty local teenagers to commit suicide on Christmas Day. Horrific. Thank God it didn’t go ahead, for whatever reason, but one of my neighbours was going to a tangi for one teenager who did commit suicide at Christmas. And talked about another who’d killed herself because of text message bullying. The girl who’d done the most bullying had turned up at the tangi for that girl, which my neighbour thought was actually brave…but then had killed herself a few days later.

It’s unbelievable. The other neighbour and I felt it was that these kids don’t have a sense of the reality of death, that once you’re gone, you’re gone. I remember years ago a boy hanged himself because he’d had an argument with his father. Hanged himself! Why would you go and do that to spite someone? There’s some strange evil process at work in all this. I feel that it’s more than just kids deciding this is the thing to do. Behind it, I sense, there’s a supernatural factor that’s inciting this kind of unreasonable behaviour.

And then there are kids who kill themselves on the road. You can kind of understand this better: kids have far less judgement in cars than more experienced drivers. They have a sense of being bullet-proof, and time and again they’ve proved their not. I noted that there was a site in the States where they have a number of tips for teenage drivers. Getting the teenagers to pay attention is, of course, the issue.

The site was brought to my attention by a car insurance company who offer a cheap car insurance quote. They offer the ability to shop for car insurance – a kind of brokerage service online. They also have a list of interesting question and answer topics: Can auto insurance save the environment, for instance, which is ‘reprinted’ from an article in the Charleston Gazette dated 28th December, 2006. Worth a look.

Now here’s a challenge. This was one of seven tips for doing better with writing in this new year. It comes from the EzineArticles newsletter.

"Start with your biggest goal and then chunk it down. Example: If your biggest goal is to produce 1,200 articles this year (100 per month, every month), work it out backwards as to how many per week, per day and per hour you'll need to produce to meet your goals. Are there other ways to meet your goals than to produce them all yourself personally?"

100 per month? 3 a day? What sort of quality are we talking about here? Okay, I can write several blog pieces a day if I want, and maybe an article or two, but 3 decent pieces a day is quite something. Although with being able to write at will on the Net these days, I suppose three relatively interesting pieces isn’t beyond the realms of possibility. Maybe it’s looking at it from a ‘biggest goal’ point of view that’s the problem. Three pieces in three different blogs a day isn’t impossible at all. On the other hand, if I was thinking in terms of three articles to be published in the normal mainstream magazines, I’d be struggling to get this together, as, I think, would any writer.

Sam Hunt

I don’t read Sam Hunt very often, and sometimes I find his ballad style not to my taste, but these are two quotations I jotted down ages ago which still appeal.

I tell him, child, look
these questions that you ask
have answers no man knows –
man writes many a book
just like he wears a mask.
Yet still the night sky flows.

From Song for Tom by Sam Hunt.

Storm is coming in that crazed rustle of leaves, the frenzied laughter of the seagulls skidding spread-eagled on the light. Like ice setting, the light sets hard.

From Plea before Storm, by Sam Hunt

Whether it's the weather or what

In the paper this morning there’s a report about a number of well-known New Zealanders called themselves the NZ Climate Science Coalition saying that they want the Government to set up a Royal Commission investigating the reality of climate change, that is, whether there really is global warming, or whether the information we’ve been getting is ‘incomplete, inaccurate and biased.’

Strong words. They say that the data from the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) released this week actually bears against the idea of global warming, rather than giving support to it.

I must say that I find the whole concept of global warming a matter of concern, more than global warming itself. There are too many sensible scientists saying things that disprove global warming – in opposition, of course, to a large number who say global warming is a reality. After the Millennium bug, and the fizzer that bird flu has been, it’s hard to know whether we’re being driven by some agenda that wants to keep us in a permanent state of ‘the sky is falling’. As I remember reading somewhere, it’s only a few decades since scientists were concerned that the earth was cooling.

Whatever the case, no doubt those who have their investments in safe things like gold and silver will come sailing through. Gold investing is still regarded as one of the world’s ways of keeping afloat through thick and thin, through global warming and global cooling, through bird flu and SARS and everything else that we’ve been battered over the head with recently.

Maybe it’s time to invest in gold!

On holiday - sort of

Because it was such a great day, and because my wife is on holiday and rather fed up about us not being able to go away, (I'm working in the evenings) we went for a ride down the Harbour (the Otago Harbour, that is, for those who don't I know I live in Dunedin, New Zealand). Lovely and hot for the first time in ages, with just the gentlest of breezes. We drove up into Roseneath, that sort of bump that sticks out into the Harbour at one point, and found what at first appeared to be a tiny children's playground (a tiny playground that is, not one for tiny children). Further down there was a seat overlooking the Bay and the bush and the houses. Just perfect. We sat and read and semi-slumbered, and answered a rather odd text from my son before deciding we needed a change.

Drove into Port Chalmers, which was mostly closed because of the holidays and then on down to Carey's Bay, which is about a kilometre further on. The Carey's Bay hotel has been much renovated and improved, and boasts three original Hoteres in the bar area, and a Lindsay Crooks in the smaller room off the side. Hotere, of course, is one of NZ's top painters (though I
can’t say he's a favourite of mine), and his work is extremely valuable. He lived at Carey's Bay for many years - and fought the proposal to bring a smelter to Aramoana, just down the road.

Lindsay Crooks was personally known to my wife and I. A gentle, friendly real bloke of a painter, who was just as happy surfing. His paintings are all over Dunedin, and we have one ourselves, along with a host of postcard sized reproductions. Lindsay died a couple of years ago from a terrible brain tumour. He was only in his forties.

We had a cappuccino each in the hotel, and asked if we could perhaps have a sandwich as well. The sandwich, when it arrived, turned out to be a wonderful mix, on a plate, of two fresh slices of bread, bits of ham, and a great salad covered in oil. Delicious! A real bonus, since we'd been expecting the usual white bread with a slice of ham and a bit of tomato. We think the cook went a bit mad, because it wasn't quite the time of day to get a sandwich apparently.

Bookkeeping for small businesses

Late last year I started using MYOB for keeping track of payments and receipts in the small home business I’m doing. (When I say, ‘small’, by the way, I mean small.) I’ve had some accounting experience, more on the bookkeeping level, so I found my way around it fairly well, although there some moments when I could have done with someone sitting at my elbow telling me what to do next. They have an efficient email help service, but to keep that up month after month would have cost me more than the (very small) business was worth at this point.
One of the small business ideas I had, and have temporarily put on the shelf, was to do bookkeeping for clients who find this a pain in the course of the ordinary work, or who just don’t have enough time at the end of the day. Someone else has had the same idea, and is obviously doing a good job with people like those I was thinking of, people who’d prefer to get on with the hands-on tasks rather than the paper chase ones. This guy does small business accounting using QuickBooks rather than MYOB, and has a number of tips on his site to help people using it - and his rates are pretty good. It’s given me an idea of how much I could charge, if ever I pick that idea up again from the corner I’ve stowed it in!

Disclosure statement

Henry James II

Mrs Touchett might do a great deal of good, but she never pleased. This way of her own, of which she was so fond, was not intrinsically offensive - it was just unmistakably distinguished from the ways of others. The edges of her conduct were so very clear-cut that for susceptible persons it sometimes had a knife-like effect.

From Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady, chapter three.

More on money

A few posts back I talked about a site in the UK I’d come across that was a kind of broker in the credit card field. It’s the sort of thing we don’t appear to have, as yet, in New Zealand.
Now I find there’s a kind of broker site for loans. I guess this might be a more common situation (online brokerage for loans, that is) but if it is, I haven’t come across it. Then again, I haven’t been looking for loans lately either! The only kind of thing I’m aware of in this field are those who broker mortgages, and they’ve been around for a while.
What seems good about this site is that they’re not blatantly looking to ‘sell’ loans to the reader. They have some very helpful articles on what sorts of loan are best for you, and what loans not to go for. I’m fortunate in that I haven’t had to borrow money for some time (apart from the never-ending mortgage – something that would have been finished years ago if we hadn’t added an extra storey on top, or built in an aluminium window at the front of the lounge, or paid off one of essential motor vehicles) but I guess there are plenty of other people who find the idea of a loan something to consider.
What I hate are those companies that advertise on tv that they’ll give you a personal loan no matter what your circumstances; they seem to be happy to lend to people who are already in financial straits, or who can’t get loans anywhere else (usually for the obvious reason that they can’t afford to pay them back) or who have a poor credit rating and so on. You wonder what sort of thing a company like this holds over the poor person’s head at the end of the day.
And then there are the companies that will cover all your other loans; just one payment a month instead of several. Yeah, but how much is that payment, and how much is the interest. I’m not even going to check it out because my suspicion is that it’s high.
I note that the site, loanwize.co.uk, has an article on avoiding using student loans. This is something I tried to get my children to think about before they dived into them. I succeeded greatly with the youngest of them (after the others found themselves in the student loan trap) but eventually even he succumbed to it. But I must give him his credit, he’s paying it back as soon as he earns again – at least that’s what he’s told me!
Disclosure statement

More on Dawkins...and some Bryson

I find Richard Dawkins’ enthusiasm for Evolution to be overwhelmingly evangelistic. He admits he’s a bit of an evangelist, but more in a negative way, trying to draw people away from mainstream religion into ‘belief’ in there not being any sort of supernatural world, or any God.
But Evolution seems to me to be full of holes. Okay, if I quote the difficulty of the eye, we’ll have scientists coming forward and telling us that the eye isn’t perfect in the way it’s formed, so therefore it couldn’t have had a designer. I could counter with the (rather weak, I admit) argument that perhaps these same scientists haven’t yet discovered why the eye has those apparent faults in its design.
I like what Bill Bryson says in his book, A Short History of Nearly Everything (pg 255 in the hardback edition): "We have a paradoxical situation. Proteins can’t exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow."
The same argument, it seems to me, relates to the whole sexual function of 99% of creatures on the planet. If, in the very earliest of times, the smallest unit of life split happily in two and kept on doing so, then why was there ever some mutation that caused one of these units to require another unit in order for a third unit to arise? (And anyway, doesn’t mutation give you the idea of something irregular in a regular system, rather than the other way around?)
At what point did two identical creatures (for want of a better description) mutate to the degree that one couldn’t do without the other? Even more extraordinary, surely, is that eventually one formed a penis and the other a vagina, and from then on they needed each other. Doesn’t this strike you as a belief system that requires more faith than one that requires you to believe in a God?
As Paul Davies writes – he’s quoted by Bill Bryson on the same page of the book – ‘If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?’ I don’t think Evolution has ever answered this question. Instead, it by passes it with the idea that things happened over a very long time.

Keeping track of those employees...what a job!

Having not long started a new job, albeit part-time, and working now with at least 30-40 other employees, (I’m not sure how many there are as they come and go on some as yet-undiscovered-roster system), I can imagine the nightmare the boss has in trying to organise these people: their days on, days off, special leave (such as bereavement, as I had to have the week after I started!), their holidays, their bonuses, you name it.
At the moment the boss seems to do this all on multiple pieces of paper. Poor her!
I came across this excellent site where you can buy employee review software to do this sort of thing for you. Loved the video, which didn’t assume you were the world’s slowest reader. It allowed you enough time to read, and then got straight on with the next screen. There’s nothing worse than a video that takes forever. (Especially ones that don’t have words at all!)