Life according to Stella

Ho, ho, ho, and a very large G&T please….

2009-12-19T22:18:00.002Z

Oh God, it’s that time of year again. And it’s all your fault (God’s, not yours, dear reader)!

Christmas comes but once a year, and bloody good thing too. It’s crept up on me like the presence of an old flatulent dog, and with just a few days to go I’ve done diddly squat. No Christmas cake being administered with brandy, no Christmas Club money to collect having been sequestered all year, and worst of all, no clue as to what to get anyone.

Where to start?

Books are always good, and bookshops are one of my favourite places. These days bookshops sell much more than books, so if your clan is literarily or musically inclined, or likes electronic and other games, stationery, or just kinda cool gadgets, a bookshop is a good destination. If you can’t get out, try the world’s leading online bookshop, Amazon.

If the love of your life is a bit of a geek, USB gifts and gadgets are a fun idea. There is an amazing array of stuff that can be attached to your PC, other than your teenage son, of course.

There are great lists of gifts for women, from the one I would like – a slanket (yes indeed, even though the name reminds me of a slinky, which is the skin of a dead lamb) – to some I may not crack a smile at (elephant poo in a box, which is probably only marginally better than elephant poo on my shoe).

If the man in your life is the adventurous type, he might like something from this selection of gifts for men. Clay pigeon shooting, driving couches and other wacky cars, or gourmet cooking lessons, there’s sure to be something he’ll love, that won’t injure him and might benefit you too.

And of course, don’t forget the kids. As if they’d let you. Want a change from built-to-crap-out-before-New-Year, plastic-fantastic, form-over-substance junk? Take a look at these Christmas presents for kids.

So, don’t panic. Don’t despair. There is help. Just down a couple of large G&Ts, charge up the credit card, and hit the internet.

Asians travel to NZ for wedding photos

2009-12-15T23:40:00.003Z

A new trend is taking hold in Asia amongst affluent and aspiring affluent newly-weds.

Couples from Singapore and Taiwan are travelling to New Zealand for a wedding photo shoot. The photos are then presented at the wedding to provide an unusual feature.

A lack of distinctive locations, lower air fares, and the influence of Lord of the Rings have contributed to an 80% increase in couples travelling to New Zealand. For many of them, this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience and they are keen to spare no expense to make it perfect.

Popular locations are the Bay of Islands, Lake Taupo, Lake Tekapo and Queenstown.

Couples can spend anywhere from NZ$20,000 (£8,800), choosing to stay in good hotels and hire rental vehicles to travel and look around. Around 40% of this is spent on the fees and air fares for the couple’s photographer and stylist.

Of course, there are extremely good photographers and stylists in New Zealand also.

Thanks to The Wedding Company for this stunning photo of Aoraki Mt Cook.

The dire state of NZ cricket

2009-12-06T05:27:00.003Z

On a rainy afternoon I sit despondent, musing on the state of batting in New Zealand cricket.

We have just lost the second test against a less than awe inspiring Pakistan line-up, who we restricted to 264 and 239 in their two innings. Not a huge mountain to ascend, one would think, until one realises that NZ made just 99 runs in their first innings. Oh dear.

Kiwis are dogged battlers, and we have occasionally pulled off mircales, so when Vettori et al went after a total of 405 in the last innings, with more than two days left to bat, it looked remotely possible. If only the top order could occupy the crease and achieve reasonable totals. Just one 100, three or four 50s, and a few more in double figures. But above all, to stay there and bat out. We might have done it. There was nothing in the pitch, a batsman's paradise, the commentators were saying.

But no. The opening partnership was broken in the second over with four runs on the board. The other opener survived 12 more overs. Number 3 gone just two overs later. Three of our four (allegedly) best batsmen gone in less than 20 overs, for less than 50 runs. Ross Taylor played a patient innings until he began to run out of recognised partners, then a stray shot had him caught on 97. Frustrating for Taylor, disaster for New Zealand.

Yes, we almost got one 100. And there was one 40, which is nearly 50, but this was by the number 8 (Vettori). And not a lot else. Mostly what we were lacking was partnerships. There was only one in excess of 50 (the 6th wicket). Three over 30, and one of those was the 9th wicket. The opening three partnershps netted only 37 runs. Our 3rd wicket (which should have been our two best batsmen) contributed one run. I feel like tearing my hair.

So the question is - do we have enough batsmen to make up a top order? Sadly, I think the answer is no. The best partnership was between Ross Taylor (number 4) and Brendon McCullum (number 7). Our second top-scorer was Vettori, who batted at 8. And there really isn't anyone else worth mentioning. That leaves five empty batting spaces (given that our four best bowlers, who did a good job, include Vettori, and there may be a case for Elliot, as he can blow a bit). But I'm afraid Messers McIntosh, Guptil, Flynn and Fulton probably need to brush up their CVs. Because they sure ain't doing the job as top order batsmen.

Daniel Vettori was quoted as saying yesterday, when NZ was three down after one session and had 330 runs or so to chase, "It's going to be difficult. We are under no illusions that it's a long way but we just have to believe."

No Dan, I'm afraid that's not enough. That might work for the Disney Corporation, but for international top order batsmen, they actually have to be able to bat.

Postscript: to add insult to injury, it began to rain just minutes after the fall of the final NZ wicket, and has continued to rain since. If tomorrow is rainy, we may have been able to burgle a draw, if only someone had stayed in.

Energy use of home office equipment

2009-12-02T22:40:00.002Z

If you have set up a home office, you might be wondering why your electricity bill has increased. Take a good look at what office equipment you have.

A typical home office might have the following:

Desktop computer comprising CPU and monitor, plus keyboard and mouse, maybe speakers
Laptop(s)
Printer
Fax machine
Telephone(s)

Computers
Back in the old days of mainframes, it was better to leave the central processing unit on all the time, as the thermal cycling at start-up was a common cause of disk failure. That's no longer hte case, and it's not necessary to leave your CPU on constantly. Switching it off when it's not in use, particularly overnight, saves electricity and also protects your equipment from electrical surges.

Likewise, monitors should be switched off when not in use. Screen savers do save screens, but not electricity. Flying windows use up about as much power as word processing.

If you use a CPU as a server, you will need to leave it on while any of your satellite units (laptops etc) are operating. But maybe it's a good night-time routine to shut down all the laptops, turn off the server monitor, and put the CPU to bed.

Printers and Fax machines
Laser printers use about a third of their power supply when on standby. So for a printer capabale of printing 8 pages per minute, you could save about 100 watts an hour.

The fax machine may need to tay on to receive, so if you hav a combination printer/fax/copier, you may not want to switch it off. If you receive faxes electronically, you'll also need to leave the CPU on, though the monitor can still go off.

Telephones
Cordless phones use electricity all the time. About 60% of a cordless phone's energy usage is while it's in standby mode. A corded phone uses just a trickle, and that comes from the phone line. If you want the convenience of a cordless phone, consider having jus tone, and using corded phones in other areas.

Growing walls

2009-11-17T21:47:00.002Z

In this day and age of concern over diminishing natural spaces, an article in today's paper gives me real hope. What a wonderful idea it would be to incorporate nature into our indoor spaces, or indeed, integrate indoor and outdoor spaces. Perhaps this is just further human interference in the natural order of things, or maybe it's a way that we as a species can enhance our lives without destroying the natural environment.

Regardless, I would love to recline in comfort, having my hair washed in warm water, my scalp massaged, and be gazing up at a wall of soft green mosses and epiphytes. Perhaps listening to a little piped tui song, or better yet, to be in earshot of a nearby open courtyard where the tuis and other native birds gather to sip nectar and banter their beautiful sounds at each other in raucous abandon.

Monologues and conversations

2009-11-11T21:06:00.003Z

Phones have been a great invention, haven't they? Where would the average teen be without a phone? My teacher friend says he as 15-year-old students who forget their pens every day, but they aways have their phones.

Historically, the government has provided the phone systems as part of the national infrastructure. These government departments were eventually privatised into the monoliths of today's telecommunication world - in New Zealand, Telecom, in the UK, British Telecom, or BT.

Not only did these companies provide and manage the infrastructure of the telphone system, they also got into the business of providing the telephone instruments. When telephones were still relatively expensive, the national provider would rent out phones to residential customers. This sometimes went on unnoticed for a good length of time. My partner discovered he had been renting a Telecom home phone for about eight years. He could have bought a very nice mobile phone for what he had paid in rental. There might still be some BT home phones lurking out there, adding a small but significant amount to your monthly phone bill.

But the telecommunications landscape is changing. Obviously traditional, fixed line telephone systems are here for a while yet, because anything where there is significant investment by business doesn't get replaced overnight. But telecoms means much more than just telephones these days, as is obvious when you look at what the telcos get involved in. The mobile phone revolution has taken phones away from a set phyiscal location and the advent of texting must be a bit like printing money for the telcos.

But of course, the big change in communication tehchology is the internet. This puts the concept of 'phone' into sharp relief, because a phone is just a handset - it's the technology behind it that's interesting. The telephone system is now much more than a technological extension of the piece of string between two tin cans. Now the handset or the computer (isn't this just another type of handset?) can broadcast to sites like Twitter and other bulletin boards. Everyone can commentate on what they're doing right now and what they're thinking. Communication is much more one-way - I'll put out there what I'm doing and thinking, and you come along at your convenience and read about it. Not so much conversation as a bunch of monologues with everyone talking and no-one listening.

We can spice up our pearls of wisdom (hey, what am I doing but putting a whole lot of opinions 'out there, with no real care as to whether anyone reads them or not?) with bright images and streaming video, which of course increases our need for bandwidth, hence the forward movement in broadband technology (SDSL internet etc).

So it is a changing world we live in. The way we interact is changing. We call it communication technology, but if I recall correctly, communication is a two-way thing. Maybe we should call it broadcast technology.

Poking the borax at our national game

2009-10-20T23:46:00.001+01:00

Weeks have passed and the world hasn’t ended. Another successful holiday programme has been run and kids, staff and parents are happy. But alas for you, dear reader, as you haven’t had the benefit of my wisdom and insightful comments for three weeks.

But I’m back. And chuckling about an article that dares to poke the borax at New Zealand’s best loved institution – the All Blacks! How dare they? Well, they do dare, and good on them.

Since Graham Henry and co. took over the All Blacks in 2004, it seems to me they have drawn towards the soccer model of ‘prima donna’, ‘touch me and I fall down in agony’, rather than the traditional rugby union model of ‘gritty bloke in a black singlet, tough as old boots, plays in a stinging southerly (cold in NZ) with two dislocated shoulders and then heads out to the back blocks of the farm with a roll of no. 8 wire ready to get up to his elbows in birthing lambs’. Argh, those days be gone (OK, not sure where the ‘talk like a pirate’ vernacular crept in from).

Nowadays, the All Blacks LOSE! And they don’t seem to CARE! That never happened before. When they lost in the past, it was after epic battles against monumental sides whose forwards had tree trunks for legs and whose backs could give Usain Bolt a run for his money. The country went into mourning, players hung their heads in shame, and the media flayed the management alive.

Today, the ‘teflon trio’, as described in the article in today’s paper, smile and talk weasel words about team bonding and the like, while faffing about trying to figure out how to coach, impart knowledge, and somehow enable the team to play well and win. The latest move is that they will all swop out of their ‘expert’ roles and do each other’s jobs.

Hmm, not sure how that will improve things.

Fashion week, part II

2009-09-29T09:58:00.008+01:00

And here's the rest of Fashion week...

Mortgages in difficult times

2009-09-28T22:41:00.000+01:00

The recession has knocked the wind out of the sails of many people.

There are numerous families where there isn’t much leeway in the monthly budget, and if expenses increase, or income decreases, a credit crisis can easily ensue. With businesses facing tough economic times, unemployment on the increase and full employment decreasing, many people will have experienced a drop in income in the last year or two. Given that savings were at very low levels, or to look at it another way, indebtedness was very high, many families are be experiencing the pinch. And reflecting that, the number of mortgagee sales has increased.

But even if you’re holding it together and your mortgage is up for renewal, you might still be in trouble. If your credit rating has taken a knock during these tough economic times, your bank may not want to renew your mortgage.

Luckily, there is such a thing as a bad credit mortgage. Not the most salubrious of names, but it’s descriptive. You don’t need such a good credit rating as for the conventional banks, but you will pay more. So it should be a stop-gap measure. Again, it may put pressure on the budget, but hopefully cutbacks can be made in other areas to accommodate the higher payments. There are many mortgage deals around at present – a combination of greater caution from the high street banks and many people facing reduced income has left more room for less conventional mortgage lenders.

If it’s just not possible to make ends meet, and you’re afraid of losing your house, check out the option of selling your home for cash, and renting it. There are companies who will give you cash for your home, with a much faster turnaround than you would get putting it on the open market. While you will obviously not get as much money, many of these companies guarantee your continued occupation of the house for a specified period. If you can get economically back on your feet in that time, you may be able to buy the house back, but even if you can’t, at least you have time to save up for another house and you don’t have the upheaval of moving twice.

Keep up with the mortgage news to stay informed on what is on offer, what changes there are to rules, and what the trends are. And above all, good luck.

WoW

2009-09-27T00:47:00.006+01:00

This is certainly the week for fabulous and fantastic fashion in New Zealand.

As well as the prestigious Fashion Week (more pictures from that later), we also have the Montana World of Wearable Art, an unashamed expression of the incredible. So, here are some pictures…

House & contents insurance

2009-09-24T09:43:00.000+01:00

Insurance snippets:

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Research by Sainsbury’s Finance shows that over one third of university students polled in the UK have no insurance for the belongings they take with them. Which is a sobering statistic when you consider that one third of students will be a victim of crime while at university.

Sainsbury’s encourages students to check whether the average £3,500 of gear is covered by their parents’ home insurance. A sensible and money-saving tip.

~

Newly-weds may be leaving themselves exposed to under-insurance if they don’t inform their insurance company of the value of wedding presents they receive. Newly married couples moving into a new home should get a number of building and contents home insurance quotes to ensure they get a competitive deal, but don’t end up lacking in cover.

~

The term ‘Internet shopping’ can have sinister overtones. A report entitled The Digital Criminal’ has been released by Legal & General, in collaboration with reformed burglar Michael Fraser. This report looks at the use of social media by the public and criminals.

The report indicates that users of social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook can be too free with information, such as when they will be away for a weekend. Though this information may be private to the user, users were inclined to accept friend or follower request from people they didn’t know. Do you know everyone who’s following you?

This is something insurance companies are aware of and will be investigating. It would be seriously upsetting if your contents insurance didn’t pay out after a burglary when the insurance company proved you had been indiscrete about your whereabouts.

Pablo Neruda

2009-09-24T03:52:00.002+01:00

Staying on the topic of South America.

Here is a beautiful piece of writing by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, one of the most influential poets of the last century. Translated from his native Spanish, the phrasing and the ideas are delicate, aching, yet never stray into sentimentality. How I wish I could appreciate it in its native form and experience the subtleties. But this English version is still highly enjoyable and quite simply, beautiful.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her voice. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

by Pablo Neruda

translated by W.S. Merwin

Destination South America

2009-09-23T23:21:00.000+01:00

One of the places on Earth I haven’t been but would love to visit is South America. It’s the geography, it’s the animals and exotic plants, it’s the fusion of native American, European and African culture. It’s the history.

It’s witnessing the teeming shore life of Patagonia’s Peninsula Valdes, alive with sea lions, elephant seals, penguins and whales, or following Magellan’s wake around the southern tip of the continent into the unknowns of the far side. It might be a cruise on the mighty, jungle-fringed Amazon River, caimans slithering into the water ahead, or trekking the fractured landscape of the Andes, past high altitude lakes, glaciers and waterfalls.

Or best of all, Carnival in the fantastic city of Rio de Janeiro, where the beautiful people go to be seen. I could spend many years of my life exploring Brazil alone. Sao Paulo, the largest city but still beautiful, with the amazing Ipiranga Museum; Salvador (or Bahia), with the historic and colourful Pelourinho square; the architecturally amazing capital city of Brasilia, built in just three years; and my favourite, Rio, city of beaches, Carnival, and the nearly 40m high statue of Christ the Redeemer – all these are places I’d love to go. I could even look at land and property for sale in Brazil, I think I’d be quite happy living there.

When preparing to travel, you must, of course, take appropriate precautions. Travelling without travel insurance is like, well, you can imagine what it might be like. Be prepared! Make sure your vaccinations are up-to-date, and check with your GP about what precautions are required where you are going. There are parts of South America where you’ll need to take anti-Malarial drugs, and rabid bats are a problem in some areas. Then pack up your bikini and your hiking boots, and away you go.

New Zealand fashion week

2009-09-23T07:16:00.028+01:00

Beware, this is an unashamed plug for the New Zealand fashion industry.

This week is Fashion week, when NZ’s brightest and best strut their stuff on the catwalk, and buyers (hopefully) dig deep in their pockets.

These are some lovely shots from early on in the week. I must acknowledge image copyright owners Air New Zealand Fashion Week & Michael Ng, and thanks to them for allowing use of images from the image gallery.

the little black dress

A bit about loans

2009-09-22T13:37:00.001+01:00

Many people are in debt these days. Here are some thoughts about loans.

Loans come in many shapes and sizes. Wikipedia explains that loans are a type of debt, and a debt instrument entails the redistribution of financial assets, over time, between lender and borrower.

Indeed, loans are debts, and debts are not to be treated lightly. The ideal is to be debt-free, with plenty of money to get what you want. But that isn’t always the case.

The downside to loans is that you not only have to repay the amount you borrowed, you also have to pay interest. It is what you pay to your creditor (whoever is lending to you) for the use of their money.

There are two basic types of loans – secured and unsecured. Secured loans use some sort of asset provided by the borrower, in case the loan is not repaid. The lender can then sell the asset to recover the value of the loan if repayments are defaulted.

The most common loan is credit card debt. I count this as a loan for anyone who does not pay their balance off in full each payment. It is, of course, unsecured. If it’s paid off monthly, it’s not a problem, but if not, it’s basically a loan at a very high rate of interest. Unsecured loans are usually at a higher rate of interest than secured.

There is an advertisement for a loan calculator and advice website in which a young woman is explaining how she got into debt on her credit card. She said that, while she kept track of her cheque account, she didn’t keep track of her credit card spending because she didn’t think of it as spending her own money. Using the calculator, she worked out how much she was paying in repayments to her credit card company, and discovered she was paying almost as much interest as capital. That’s very scary kind of ignorance.

Of course, our biggest loan is usually to buy a house. This is a secured loan, with the house as surety. The scariest thing about a mortgage is that you often pay as much in interest as you pay capital. In other words, you end up paying twice as much as the advertised price for your home. Usually though, people are just used to many years of paying a set amount each month for the mortgage.

In the middle of ultra-short-term loans (credit card) and ultra-long-term loans (mortgage) are a variety of other types of loans. Common loans are for purchase of a car, often secured against the car. There are unsecured personal loans, from a variety of reputable and less reputable operators. The interest rates on these are usually very high, and I would not take one of these out except from a reputable institution. Your bank may well provide you with an unsecured personal loan in the form of an overdraft on your bank account. If they are prepared to do this it’s because they have a history of your banking behaviour and will feel confident that you will repay the debit balance of your account.

Borrowing money is a minefield of dangers. Interest on loans can be crippling, sliding you further and further into debt. Consider carefully whether you really do need that overseas trip right now. If you are unsure of what option suits you best, consult a firm of reputable loan brokers or financial advisors. Your bank may provide these, or it might be better to try and find someone independent.

Best of all, though, is to stay out of debt as much as possible.

The recession is over

2009-09-21T11:56:00.000+01:00

The recession is over. Or probably over. Or might be nearly ending.

Well, hallelujah. All ye financial services boffins and bankers, rejoice. The recession is over.

But as for the rest of us, I fear it’s only just the beginning.

Insurance – who needs it?

2009-09-18T13:15:00.000+01:00

Why is it important to have insurance?

According to the Online dictionary, it means, amongst other things, ‘a protective measure’.

So what do we need protection against? I guess the main thing about insurance is that it lets you pay a little bit over a long time, in case you are liable for paying out a big sum for something, sometime.

There a lots of different types of insurance. One of the most common personal types (things that insure your person) is life insurance. This provides money if you die. There are various types of term assurance and life cover, from simple lump sum payments when you die, to providing for funeral costs, providing ongoing payments if you leave behind underage children, or paying off the remainder of your mortgage.

A less pessimistic type of personal cover is health-related insurance. This includes medical, which covers treatment for and/or loss of income caused by medical conditions, or injury insurance, which is cover specifically in case of an injury.

Then there is insurance for your assets. Mostly this covers your house, contents and car. If you have a business, there is insurance for commercial buildings, farms, stock and so forth.

Finally, there is insurance in case you do something wrong at work. This is indemnity insurance. This covers you against being liable personally if you make a mistake in your work that costs someone else. For example, if you are a surgeon, you may have insurance that pays out if you are found guilty of medical misadventure. If you are a project manager, you may have insurance that pays out if you make a mistake in your project that ends up costing your client lots of money.

Within each of these categories there are many variations and specific inclusions and exclusions. For example, car insurance often has extra cover just for broken windscreens.

Insurance companies put many rules around insurance cover. Sometimes insurance can be difficult to claim, as you have to prove that the reasons for the loss are valid in terms of the insurance rules. For example, whiplash is a very difficult injury to prove, so insurance companies often won’t pay out for it.

If you are unfamiliar with insurance, it’s definitely worthwhile getting some knowledgeable help from someone you can trust. Often an older family member or friend who has had insurance for some years can explain the basics, or you can talk to a financial advisor. Just remember that an advisor may be biased if he or she is getting paid commission by some of the insurance companies whose products they are offering.

From division, innovation

2009-09-18T03:31:00.000+01:00

Sixty-six years ago, a careless comment lead to a disagreement that has split a small German town, and provided the world with some of the best sports shoes ever.

Before 1943, Rudi and Adi Dassler were happily (or perhaps, not so happily) running the family business together in the small Bavarian town of Herzogenaurach. Their business was already well known – they provided the shoes worn by Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics.

But after being in an air raid shelter one night in 1943, the brothers were never to work together again. Adi continued the business, which was to become adidas, and Rudi, after spending some time in an American prisoner of war camp after the war, returned to Herzogenaurach and set up Puma on the other side of town.

And the feud has continued ever since. The place is known as the “town of bent necks” because everyone checks what shoes you are wearing before deciding whether or not to talk to you. Employees of the two firms do not fraternise.

But now, today’s bosses are to bury the hatchet (not in one another’s backs, one hopes), shaking hands as part of a peace initiative entitled Peace One Day, which is the brainchild of German film-maker Jeremy Gilley. To consolidate the gesture, the staff of the two firms will play a game of football.

I wonder what brand of shoes the referee will be wearing.

Savings snippets

2009-09-17T23:31:00.000+01:00

And here is the latest savings news…

ISA allowance to increase for over-50s: Anyone aged over 50 before April this year will see their ISA allowance increase almost 50% to £10,200 this October. An altogether more realistic figure.

Offshore account tax: The Government is expecting a good tax take from offshore accounts that will come under scrutiny following a historic agreement with Liechtenstein. They’ll need it to offset the multi-billion pound financial sector bail-outs of the last year or two.

Child Trust Funds reach 4.4 million: That’s a lot of children in the UK under seven years old, who have been set on the road to starting tertiary education with savings in the bank, and encouraged to get into the savings ‘habit’. Good stuff.

FSA considering banning commissions for IFAs: The Financial Services Authority (FSA) is thinking about banning commission payments to Independent Financial Advisors (IFAs). Makes sense really – how independent can they be when the companies whose products they are touting pay them?

Britons ‘save for England’: According to National Savings & Investments’ (NS&I) quarterly savings report, Britons are saving more than ever. This is somewhat at odds with public perception, with half the people interviewed believing they are saving less. There is certainly a plethora of savings vehicles available, from ISAs, self invested personal pensions (SIPPS investments), CTFs (child trust funds – yes, children are being encouraged too), premium bonds and so forth, many of which have tax incentives.

Expatriates targeted: Britons overseas can save with their home banks, with online expatriate savings accounts, allowing them to take advantage of their preferential tax status.

Why is it important to save for the future? Click here to find out.

Kids and mobile phones

2009-09-16T23:03:00.001+01:00

Mother’s worst nightmare. My pre-teen is turning into a mobile phone monster.

Last Christmas, the big presents were Rock Band, and a mobile phone for my daughter, then just 11. We were optimistic and thought she would be different. She wouldn’t become a textaholic like all the rest.

Bzzt. Wrong answer. I’ve just taken the phone off her for the second time because she’s running the pre-pay balance down too far. The first time, she got through her three-month allocation in about five weeks. There were 60c left – not even enough to make that emergency call, which is what she has the phone for.

Three months is too long for her to try and keep track, I thought, so I devised a sheet where she writes down her balance every day, and compares it to how much she should have left on the phone. Three weeks in all had seemed well – she was writing up a figure every few days, and seemed to be tracking nicely, even under-using the phone a bit – but then I offered to check the phone (which I was always going to do, I’m not that wet behind the ears), and the admission comes out, she’s been lying and writing up false records.

So the phone’s with me again. The deal is, she loses it until the balance catches up with what the balance should be, which will be about the 3rd of October. Which makes me think again about why she has the phone.

From a kid’s point of view, mobile phones are not emergency contact devices. I need my daughter to have one of these, but it’s not the fully-functional mobile phone she currently has (or doesn’t have, just now). She wants something she can use to keep up with her friends, who are texting away furiously. I need her to have something so I can text or talk to her, to make arrangements and so forth. So that’s my first issue – how to separate the two uses. Might mean two phones. I’ll need to ponder that one.

The second issue is, how do we (she and I) make sure that her use of the social interaction tool that is what a mobile phone is for kids, is balanced and doesn’t adversely affect her life? I’m not prepared to fund a mobile phone habit. My daughter gets pocket money each month – she can use that to pay for her top up. One thing to watch out for is late night contacts. Young people are apparently the most sleep-deprived in our society because they stay up very late communicating by text. So I think the mobile will be spending nights with me, switched off, and doesn’t get switched on again until it leaves the house in the morning.

So, I have about three weeks to ponder this. I’ll talk it over with her father – he is a secondary school teacher, and has lots of experience with kids and mobile phones – and after 3rd of October, we might have a new scheme to put into place.

And this doesn’t even begin to address the fact that she lied and misled me, something she doesn’t normally do. That’s a whole different kettle of fish.

Panama

2009-09-16T12:21:00.000+01:00

Beaches, amazing architecture, a hot climate, and of course, that canal – who wouldn’t want to emigrate to Panama? Not yet as tourist-frequented as Costa Rica or Guatemala, there are wonderful places to live and plenty of opportunity.

Immigration is not a big deal. If you have as little as a £60K for investments in a Panamanian business, you will be eligible for an Immigrant visa, which will eventually lead to a nationality card. Invest more and you’ll be eligible for the card more quickly.

The economy is primarily service oriented, with a short supply of skilled labour, so finding work, or even starting your own business shouldn’t be a problem. There is a thriving banking sector offering the likes of offshore financial services, and of course, there is shipping, the Panama Canal, and all its associated business.

It’s a good idea to invest in Panama real estate too, there are plenty of valuable properties available at reasonable prices for those willing to shop around.

Spaghetti and meatballs

2009-09-16T05:24:00.003+01:00

Here’s my very own meatballs recipe. Good meatballs with a nice sauce make a yummy and healthy meal.

Meatballs

500g premium grade mince (the best you can afford, or consider making your own)
250g sausage meat
breadcrumbs
1 egg
dried basil
dried oregano
freshly ground black pepper
rock salt (small amount)

Put all ingredients in a bowl and mix together. Best to use your hands and really work everything through. Add enough breadcrumbs to help the mixture bind together. Form into balls according to what size you prefer, though I suggest keeping the size on the small side to ensure they cook through properly. If you have a deep fryer, deep fry them making sure to drain them very well. Otherwise, shallow fry in a reasonable amount of good quality oil, I use extra virgin olive oil. Make sure the oil does not have too strong a flavour so it doesn’t overpower the flavour of the meatballs. Drain well and keep warm if the sauce is not finished.

Sauce
400g tin of chopped tomatoes in juice
125ml chicken stock
125ml beef stock
Dried basil
Dried oregano
Freshly ground black pepper
50ml tomato paste

Combine all ingredients in a saucepan and heat over a low element. Allow to simmer for as long as necessary, stirring occasionally, but don’t let it dry out. The sauce should thicken.

Optional: You may like to put the meatballs into the sauce. They aren’t as crispy but they absorb the flavour.

Boil up the spaghetti according to the packet instructions. Fresh pasta is best. Put pasta on plates, place enough meatballs for each person, and ladle over sauce.

Grate some cheese – parmesan is traditional but the kids like ordinary cheddar or edam – and sprinkle over the meatballs, sauce and pasta.

Save, save, save

2009-09-15T11:17:00.001+01:00

Here’s a little home-grown wisdom.

Governments have been urging us to save for many years. Banks, on the other hand, have been urging us to borrow. Though they like our savings too, so they can lend it to other people. When my parents were young, they didn’t borrow money, except to buy a house. And I have to say, I go along with their thinking. If I can’t afford it, whatever it is, I won’t buy it now. I’ll save up for it. But many people, with easy access to loans such as topping up the mortgage, credit cards, pay nothing for three years etc., will buy now and pay later.

The downside of that scheme is that you are ransoming your future. When you have the flat screen telly, home theatre system, even faster PC and gaming console in your home, of which you own about 10% if you’re lucky, all on credit, you’re locked in. You can’t decide to take a couple of months off work. You can’t even change jobs unless you have another job to go to. You must keep your income stream coming in, or default your loans. And God forbid, what will happen if you get sick?

So it’s rather nice that some Government’s give good incentives for saving. In the UK there is the lovely wee ISA – Individual Savings Account, as opposed to ISA or isa which mean all sorts of other things - which replaced the lovely wee TESSA and has spawned the tongue twisting TOISA (dear me, when will it end).

But ISAs are a bloody good idea. Government gives a yearly limit, and you can plonk money into an accredited cash ISA savings account, and guess what, you don’t pay any tax on the interest. Though when you think about it, it’s a little bit of “the tax man giveth, the tax man taketh away”. Hmm. Oh well, at least there are advantages to it.

There are lots of schemes out there and I wouldn’t try to recommend the best ISA. Talk to a financial advisor, or check out any of the comparison websites.

And if ISAs aren’t your cup of tea, there are always other instruments such as fixed rate bonds or offshore accounts. But above all, start saving!

Charles Darwin movie too controversial for US

2009-09-15T01:02:00.001+01:00

Back to movies, here is something about a movie that hasn’t even hit the box office yet.

A British movie about Charles Darwin has opened the Toronto film festival to acclaim, leading to world-wide distribution. Well, almost worldwide. One country is notable by its absence in the queue for Creation – the USA.

It seems the majority of US citizens do not believe the theory of evolution. A ‘Christian’ movie review website described Darwin as “a racist, a bigot and an 1800s naturalist whose legacy is mass murder”. The review goes on to claim that Darwin’s “half-baked theory” directly influenced Adolf Hitler and led to “atrocities, crimes against humanity, cloning and genetic engineering”.

Phew. That’s pretty harsh stuff against a man who was a scientific celebrity in his time and received the Royal Society’s Royal Medal for his work. But of course, he was British, not American.

9/11 remembered

2009-09-11T03:47:00.001+01:00

Eight years on and the site of the World Trade Centre is still a hole in the ground.

Maybe while the western world is in the midst of a global economic meltdown, it’s a good time to reflect on the real human tragedy that hit the US business world in 2001. Business is about people, and fancy suits and million dollar bonuses are all so much pap when you’re on the 28th floor and the building is burning beneath you.

There were heroes that day – the firefighters who tried to rescue as many as possible, and lost their own lives, the individual who did not run but stayed to help. The US reeled in the face of this assault within the hallowed shores that have so often kept them safe. But no more. The world is getting smaller, and when war is waged with small armies, especially those who are willing to sacrifice themselves, defence is all the harder.

The attack was all the more brutal for its unexpectedness, the sheer chutspah of its scale and daring, against a population who felt remote and protected from this kind of atrocity, which no doubt its perpetrators experienced in their homelands daily (if on a much smaller scale). The West was outraged at this infiltration, and afraid that such an effect could have been wrought on its people.

But where was the public outrage that rippled through the world at the bombings in Beirut? Where were the calls for a war against terror when a young woman lay dying in a Tehran street, recorded on YouTube for all to see? Where were the politicians demanding action when a woman and her eight children had to flee out of Kabul on foot in pre-election attacks? Because mini-9/11s happen all the time in those war-torn places of the world where the Israeli Governnent want to secure more land for its people, where the war against terror is waged by the US and its allies, where corrupt politicians use armies to secure more power for themselves, regardless of the cost to the people they are in power to protect.

The world must remember 9/11, as it must remember all ruling party- and Government-sanctioned acts of violence. Because one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.

Broadband for the rural sector

2009-09-11T02:21:00.002+01:00

While the internet revolution is alive and well in urban New Zealand, for those who live distant from an exchange, it’s a different story. But help is at hand.

New Zealand’s Communications and IT Minister Steven Joyce yesterday announced the Government’s rural broadband strategy, a NZ$300 million package designed to deliver high speed, affordable broadband to over 80% of rural households, and over 90% of rural schools.

“Around half of rural households are coping with dial up speeds currently and that's not good enough in the 21st century,” the Minister said.

So why is broadband so important these days?

As an urban user I’m seeing my life and habits changing to make use of the tools and applications available via my PC (PCs, nowadays). I run a small business, and accept payment via bank transfer. Most of my communication with clients is through email. I’m a bit of a social networker and enjoy online chatting with my friends. I do basically all my banking, and management of my utilities through the internet. Even my pension provider is urging me to connect with them online.

So if I was hundreds of kilometres from the nearest urban centre, on one of New Zealand’s vast tracts of sheep farmland, how on earth would I survive with a 56k dial-up connection? That’s what Landcorp, a state-owned NZ agribusiness which manages over 100 farms of more than 300,000ha, wants to know. Landcorp works hard to promote good, sustainable and profitable farming practice amongst its farmers. The main benefits Landcorp sees from their farmers having broadband access is the ease with which communication can be delivered, such as company information, sharing of ideas and practices between farmers (forums), video conferencing to save travel costs (both in dollar and energy terms), and allowing farmers to use online applications and services that are useful to any business, such as budgeting services, Inland Revenue filing and utilities.

Other beneficiaries of broadband to the rural sector will be the multitude of non-farming business ventures. The operator of an airline that runs out of a small rural centre commented that they do have broadband access, but at a much higher cost than for urban-based businesses. They rely on it for online booking facilities and a VoIP (voice over IP) phone system. This is costing them $75 - $100 more a month than the equivalent service in an urban centre.

The education sector will also benefit. The Minister detailed that 93% of rural schools will be connected via fibre optic cable, allowing them to access super high speed internet. My children’s urban school is just replacing half their PCs with higher specs because teachers are making so much use of online applications that the three-year-old PCs from the previous upgrade no longer cut the mustard. Teaching in many New Zealand schools has embraced the information superhighway (what a dated term that is now!), but technology is one of the big barriers to greater uptake.

Other than schools themselves, families and children in remote areas will benefit greatly from improved access. An education provider who oversees a large, sparsely populated geographical area described a family who farm in a remote part of her turf, who not only have young (primary and pre-school aged) children, but for whom English is a second language. Currently, it costs the equivalent of almost two months’ urban broadband rental for the educator to make a single round trip to visit this family. Internet technology can make the delivery of education tools far more efficient, again saving time and energy.

Who knows, in years to come, farmers may be out checking their far flung paddocks, wearing their bluetooth headsets, ordering stock feed and fencing materials using VoIP, while their children, back in the farmhouse, take part in a virtual classroom environment via video conferencing.

Lehman’s gone, now one year on

2009-09-10T03:50:00.000+01:00

It’s just on a year since the US’s biggest bankruptcy, and to mark the occasion, the BBC has released a radio dramatisation of the last three days of Lehman Brothers.

A dry subject, you might imagine, but I listened to The Day That Lehman Died last night, and found it strangely compelling. The overriding question that remained was, why Lehman, or more specifically, when Merrill Lynch and AIG were bailed, why NOT Lehman. The impression I got was that Lehman was seen as having overreached itself, having broken some unspoken, unwritten rule about taking on toxic debt (in the sub-prime market). When it came down to it, the decision by the Federal Reserve sounded personal.

The only criticism I would have of the drama was that the actors sounded like actors. Senior executives of banks probably don’t generally sound like BBC radio announcers.

Still, it’s worth a listen and gives a good understanding of the shenanigans that went on in these massive financial institutions, which took money off thousands of individuals and then tried to wring every last cent out of it in profit, ending up losing a good deal of it because they lent it to people who couldn’t afford to pay it back. One thing about this whole financial mess which still seriously irks me is that these ridiculously rich individuals insist on paying themselves and their colleagues multi-million dollar bonuses, even when they have quite obviously not succeeded in the running of their business. That would be like the head of a hospital receiving a commendation after poor practice in the hospital let most of the patients die.

Home improvements and ethical living

2009-09-09T11:09:00.001+01:00

Ethical living seems to be the next big thing.

The whole movement is fascinating. It seems it can be anything from the simple personal choice of recycling, to a complete lifestyle change involving burying your biological waste and not washing much.

As with all such movements, there are zealots who implore others to set aside their wicked ways and follow in the light. Corporates or “big business” is a particular target, unsurprisingly given how much waste is thus produced.

If you want to live in an ethical home, there are many books and websites that can give you ideas. There is a whole range of things that individuals can do. It’s all very well to say that this effort is insignificant in the global scheme of things, but I think every little bit helps, and you’ve got to start somewhere.

It’s hard to change an existing home, but it is possible. You can start with simple practices in the home – recycling, composting, installing a low flow shower head, turning off lights when not in a room, turning off appliances at the wall when you go away, or even just overnight.

Existing homes can be fitted with renewable energy capture equipment, such as solar panels or small wind turbines, but of course, it’s much easier to do (and more effective) if you build from scratch. Which can be difficult if you already own a home, but you can maybe get cash for home if you sell to one of those quick sale places, and then buy some land and start from scratch.

One of the big areas where we can be “greener” is the bathroom, in terms of creating a relaxing, safe and clean environment. The standard bathroom suite is not necessarily the best for this sort of bathroom. Large baths are a luxury and use a lot of water. But every now and then we deserve this sort of pampering. So we need both a luxurious, deep bath and an energy-efficient shower. Ideally, it would be possible to create a smaller bath within our large bath – that might be an idea for bathroom specialists. A bit like an adult-sized baby bath.

Our bathroom furniture can help with the atmosphere – I prefer natural woods, properly protected for the damp air, over too much chrome and porcelain. A wooden floor is warmer than tiles, and so mitigates the need for under-floor heating.

Movie review: Inglourious Basterds

2009-09-09T02:55:00.000+01:00

Inglourious Basterds is a movie I was surprised to have very much enjoyed. Quentin Tarantino rides again.

Not for the squeamish, but the whole feel of the movie is so over the top that the violence, for once, didn’t bother me. Probably because I didn’t engage with any of the characters. Couldn’t care less if they lived or died. But that’s not to say I wasn’t interested in what happened to them.

It was a complex, interwoven little plot sequence. It wasn’t really about the Basterds, a crack squad of Americans operating in France with the sole aim of putting terror into the hearts of the Nazis. It certainly wasn’t about the bungling British, though the scene with Churchill and Mike Meyers as a nancy British high commanding officer was surreal and quite one of the most memorable pieces of the film. It was, to an extent, about the Jewish girl who escaped from the Nazis early on, and plotted her revenge later. It wasn’t about the young German soldier who rather fancied her, but who turned out to be a prat, like all the rest.

For me it was mostly about the marvellous German Jew Hunter, a clever, clever detective who did some clever, clever detectoring that lead to a satisfying conclusion.

The characters were two dimensional to the point of being parodies (particularly the British, but then, Brad Pitt as the leader of the Basterds was pretty ridiculous too – he’s turning into another Johnny Depp, I haven’t seen him play a character with any, well, character, for ages, if ever, but he plays the larger than life and twice as silly ones with aplomb). The staging, the lighting, the costumes and the makeup were perfect, as you’d expect from Tarantino. You can even forgive him writing over the scene and using arrows to point out notable people in the German high command (Goerring, Borman etc). And the somewhat affected spelling of the film title. Heck, he’s Quentin Tarantino, he can do what he likes.

As a native German speaker I enjoyed the authentically spoken German. There is a lot of German and French (and even a little Italian) spoken in the movie and subtitles are used extensively. I enjoy hearing other languages spoken and so this was a plus for me.
I’m probably not selling this well, but for the movie to work, I believe it had to be somewhat unbelievable. This could have been just another grim, gut wrenching war movie, but it wasn’t. It really was about a whole bunch of pretty unpleasant people who, by and large, got what they deserved. Go and see it!

All about mortgages

2009-09-08T11:08:00.000+01:00

With the housing market potentially picking up again, there are people out there who are considering their first mortgage. There are some things that a worth knowing.

The mortgage itself is an interest in your asset (usually a house), and is provided as security to the organisation lending you the money. When people talk about a mortgage, they mostly mean the money lent to buy the house or whatever. But this is a loan, often known as the home loan.

If you’re thinking of signing up for a home loan, it pays to do your homework. This is probably the biggest loan you’ll ever take out, be it for a house or apartment, bare land, maybe a farm, or for commercial property. You will be in debt to an amount that you may never be able to pay off. Luckily, you have a valuable asset to secure against that debt. If you ever want to discharge the debt, you just have to sell the asset, which will give you enough cash to pay it off. In fact, what usually happens is that you decide you want to move on, and sell the asset to pay off the debt, and start up a new debt against a new asset. If you stick with the same lending institution, it may look like you’ve just transferred the security from one asset to another.

The biggest pitfall with home loans is the fact that the amounts are so big, that interest on the loan is significant. Mortgage rates, or home loan rates, are quite low compared with other lending, but the real amount of money paid for interest is a lot. So a few tenths of a percent makes a big difference, making it very important to shop around.

Home buyers need to be careful about fees too. There are legal fees, of course, which are in line with legal fees for other things – exorbitant but no more so than you’d expect. Fees charged by the lender can be surprising, it seems unlikely that merely drawing up a contract, or loading a new client onto a computer application, would really cost hundreds of dollars or pounds.

There are many places to find information about taking up a mortgage and home loan, such as magazines, or ezines with mortgage news. They provide information that helps you understand the different components of the process of borrowing large amounts of money, and securing your asset.

One set of fees I haven’t mentioned are those of the estate agent. Unfortunately, most agents still charge a percentage on the sale price, implying that the more expensive the sale, the more work they did. Which seems unlikely. However, things are changing in the estate business, with many different types of players in the market now. There are agents that will buy your house if you need to sell for cash quickly, then they presumably sell on at a profit. Certainly many different scenarios.

MIA

2009-09-08T00:04:00.005+01:00

Oops, don’t know where last week went. Sometimes, life just overtakes me.

I do know where the weekend went, though, and it was loads of fun. The man, the kids and I took off for a day’s skiing on one of New Zealand’s active volcanoes. Mt Ruapehu is host to two commercial and one club ski field, and serves the whole of the North Island, so is very popular.

We stayed at the Ohakune Top 10 Holiday Park, very nice and with an amazing bathroom (the kids loved the hand basin, which consisted of concave glass plate from which water spilled in a waterfall down into the one piece glass basin), and the square, flat shower head which rained down on them.

Ohakune is just at the bottom of the access road to Turoa, the fiel d we wanted to ski, but unfortunately high winds spoiled our chances there. We drove up for a look on Saturday, but left again as most of the field was closed.

The weather report on Sunday morning was for more of the same, so we packed up at great speed and took off around the mountain to Whakapapa, which is almost directly opposite Turoa. As expected, it was sheltered and we had the most glorious day pottering about on the slopes.

The kids tried snowboarding and enjoyed themselves, especially my boy who spent his whole time going up and down the learners’. We are planning a week-long assault on the South Island fields next year!

The beautiful game

2009-08-29T03:22:00.001+01:00

No, I don’t mean soccer. Played by skinny prima donnas with lucky legs (lucky they don’t break and go right up their a***s).

I mean indoor netball. Of course, outdoor is a pretty awesome game too, but I don’t like now aggressive its gotten, and I don’t like a sport where its professional representatives are forced to wear a uniform that shows off their underwear (except for wrestling, of course, where they perform in their underwear).

But in terms of a game to play, and to watch at the highest level, especially the mixed and men’s form, indoor netball is the game for me. I play the six-a-side version, with two defenders, two attackers and two links, on a court surrounded by nets, including overhead, with no out of bounds areas. Its fast, furious and heaps of fun when played against teams who know how to play.

Of course, there is a certain amount of danger, especially when you play against ex-basketballers and ex-rugby players who don’t realise it is a non-contact sport. And it really is. The best games are where players in each team take the rules right to the wire, but don’t cheat. I don’t have a problem with leaning up against my opposite number under the hoop when getting in position for the ball, but when I have it, I don’t expect anyone to touch me. And I certainly don’t expect anyone to push, bash or knock me over, stick their hands in my face, or clothes-line me with arms or legs out wide. That’s not part of the game.

But to see some of the young players (that’s not me, sadly) pluck the ball out of the air at impossible heights of the ground, the fast passes up and down the court, the insane intercepts that they couldn’t possibly have tipped, and finally, the ball go ‘swoosh’ through the net to score two points when expertly projected from outside the D – ah, that’s the beautiful game for me.

Secret bank accounts

2009-08-28T13:39:00.000+01:00

Are the days of the secret offshore account numbered?

Landmark agreements, such as that between UBS, the Swiss government, and the US government, and that between the UK government and Liechtenstein, may spell the end of being able to safely and secretly store away money in an offshore account. Offshore financial services will still be available, but British citizens will be obliged to accurately disclose any earnings for tax purposes.

Perhaps due to the global financial crisis, people’s appetites for tolerance of tax evasion seems to have eroded somewhat. It’s galling enough hearing about the multi-million dollar profits and huge bonuses flowing to the finance sector, but the thought that the cash-strapped governments that bailed out these miscreants are being cheated out of money that can be used to pay for education and health care, and even keep tax rates lower for everyone, may be too much to bear.

There have been a number of studies carried out regarding people’s attitudes to the ethics of tax evasion. It seems there is some tolerance for tax evasion, but only in certain circumstances, such as when governments or officials are seen as corrupt, or the choice is between paying taxes or feeding your family. Most people, however, don’t think that tax evasion is ethical.

So, it’ll still be possible to have the cool, racy offshore account, but it’ll come with a taxable label. Of course, you could deposit your laundered money with one of a myriad willing Nigerians who will happily keep it secret from the government, and from you too, no doubt. The rest of us will just pay our dues.

Teens save bus driver

2009-08-28T00:22:00.000+01:00

With so many stories about youth offending, domestic violence and our general indifference to one another, I read a story in this morning’s paper with real pleasure.

Just before 7am, an Auckland schoolbus had just picked up a large group of school students ranging from primary right up to senior secondary school age. They were probably doing what large groups of children do – talking, laughing and being generally noisy.

A man who also boarded the bus took exception to this and, as the bus moved away from the stop, swore at the children. The bus driver told the man to be quiet, but the man began advancing down the bus, shouting, swearing and making racist remarks at the students.

The driver, a 56-year-old grandfather, grew concerned at the man’s behaviour and, believing he intended to harm the children, stopped the bus and demanded the man get off. Whereupon the man grabbed the driver, dragged him off the bus and onto the street, and began hitting him about the head and face.

The bus driver recalls, “He hit me the first time on the side of the head, which stunned me a bit. The second hit, I got an eyeful of blood in my right eye.”

The children on the bus shouted and pleaded with the man to stop, but the man continued to rain blows, hitting the driver another six or seven times.

Continued the driver, “That's when I saw three to four pairs of feet go past me and I don't know what [the students] did - yell or push him away - but it did the job. He ran off across the road.”

Other students called the police and an ambulance. A group of 16- and 17-year-old boys were identified as those who came to the aid of the bus driver.

“I didn't see any of them. I don't know their names, but they are good kids,” the driver said.

The bus driver’s union made a statement in which it said, “…we're extremely grateful to the students who assisted [the driver]. It showed courage and most likely has saved this man's life.” The union was planning a ceremony to acknowledge the students’ actions.

A man had been arrested and is to appear in court on charges of assault.

HDTV

2009-08-27T08:18:00.000+01:00

High definition TV seems to be the next big thing in television technology. I’m really excited about the thought of getting crystal clear pictures on a big screen in my lounge.

There have been some huge steps in TV technology in recent years. I’ve been basically ignoring my television since 1996 – too busy, nothing good to watch, etc. But last year I gave in to the kids and bought my first TV in about 16 years. Well, they’ve changed a bit. I remember the hubby and I, back in the early ’90s, were very excited about getting a 21” screen, and the thing was like a small freezer. It had to have its own corner unit.

By contrast, the 42”, flat, glossy black instrument I bought last year sits sleekly in my lounge. I mostly watch sport and movies, and it’s great getting such a huge picture. Make the slo-mo replays of catches in the cricket and tries in the rugby so much better.

High definition television is, of course, just digital TV with higher definition, or more lines. A HDTV will display a high definition signal in high definition. It won’t improve a standard definition signal, of course. I’m still a bit confused about what is a HDTV, and what HDTV-compatible means. I need to read up on the technology news to get the good oil. Hopefully, I won’t need to change my lovely, big, black TV any time soon, though.

If I do, though, I am concerned as to what will happen to it. Because mine is relatively new, I should be able to sell it off (at a bit of a loss, but oh well). But if you have an older set, there’s not much market, especially if it’s an old CRT. And there’s plenty of those still around because they basically don’t wear out. Good on Sony in the UK, who are offering a trade-in discount on your old TV if you buy one of their new Bravias. Hopefully they will dispose of the old telly thoughtfully. I must check out if Sony here in NZ does something similar.

Good Kiwi writing

2009-08-26T12:44:00.002+01:00

When I’m not harping on about the economy, telling you about my bathroom, or trying to figure out my computing needs, I’m quite a fan of creative writing.

So this is an unashamed plug for the really cool website of a really cool Kiwi writer. I’ve often enjoyed the sometime acerbic, sometime maudlin, sometime absolutely hilarious writing style of John Irvine. His execution is immaculate, and his work is always a pleasure to read.

It’s a lovely website – a library cum bookshop of his works and works to which he has contributed. It’s well worth a browse, and you can purchase if you want to. There’s even gentle music to put you in the right mood.

Also, there’s a section just about John and his writing mate, Dave Freeman – a dry-witted British non-convict who’s taken up residence in the far western reaches of Australia. How they can be friends is beyond me, but I think it has something to do with their personal distaste of each other. Certainly, based on their exchanges of insults, you’d think they couldn’t stand one another. Obviously, best of mates in that blokey kind of way Anglo-Saxons have.

Links lets you trail around the internet for a good while, sampling interesting tidbits from a rather classy set of John’s writing friends, and some of the more interesting, and less mainstream online writing magazines.

The best bit, of course, is the link to John’s actual, online published work. Some of it takes a bit of finding, but that’s why the ‘Find’ facility is useful. To make it easy, here’s a direct link to one of his gruesome masterpieces, Hark the Herald Angels sing.

Why have home insurance?

2009-08-25T22:41:00.001+01:00

In the current recession, there has been an increase in people cancelling or not renewing their insurance. But is this a wise move?

Given how much it costs to buy a house, you might think it’s just another unnecessary expense to insure your home and contents. But think again.

Home insurance is ‘just in case’ something bad happens, and you pay a little each month so that, if the worst does happen, you can recover from it.

What is the worst that could happen? Well, your house might burn to the ground. If you had no home insurance, you would have (probably) a large mortgage for nothing but a bit of land, and no house. You would still have to pay the mortgage, but you have only bare land to sell and, worst of all, nothing to live in.

It’s worth having insurance when the worst that could happen is devastating, and is not something you are likely to be able to financially recover from.

What’s the worst that could happen to your contents? They could all be destroyed in the fire that razes your house. Or, they could all be stolen. Again, no insurance means no money to replace things. And you may have bought some things on hire purchase, such as all the whitewear, furniture and so on. So you still owe for all those things you bought and haven’t yet paid for, but you don’t have the things. Not good.

Home insurance news is full of great articles about what you should be paying for home insurance, and what you should expect. It’s a highly competitive market, so it is worthwhile informing yourself of what’s on offer, so you can negotiate a good deal and not pay any more than you need to.

Favourite poetry

2009-08-25T05:57:00.002+01:00

I want to share one of my favourite poems. It’s written by New Zealand poet James K Baxter. His work is well worth a Google.

High Country Weather
alone we are born
and die alone
yet see the red-gold cirrus
over snow-mountain shine
upon the upland road
ride easy stranger
surrender to the sky

your heart of anger

PCs changing our lives

2009-08-24T22:18:00.000+01:00

How is the personal computer changing the way we operate in our everyday lives?

I’ve noticed that I’m increasingly using my PC in place of other tools that I would have used five, ten or more years ago.

For example, I use an electronic diary, whereas a few years ago I used a filofax, and before that, just an ordinary desk diary. And 15 different notebooks and lists scattered throughout my home and office. Now everything gets entered into my diary – meetings, appointments, visits from friends, also reminders (transfer money to my current account, go to school to collect kids, go to the gym etc) that go ‘ding’ at appointed times and grab my attention.

Currently I’m working from home so everything I need is in my house. I have a lovely, light laptop which I can carry around in one hand. I have a simple wireless network, which means that the desktop has a grunty hard drive which the two laptops can access. So I can sit down at any of the PCs and access my data, meaning it’s useful to have it all there.

Take cooking, for instance. The desktop is in the kitchen and if I need an idea of how to, for example, extract vanilla from a vanilla bean or make pizza dough, I just Google it and watch the video on YouTube. Or for ideas on what to do with a tomato, some yoghurt and a bit of leftover roast lamb, I’ll Google ‘recipes’ and include those ingredients. And I have a whole heap of recipe documents on my shared drive. I do still have cookbooks and have favourite recipes written down, but I find myself more and more often turning to the PC.

And isn’t YouTube just the thing? Everything is there. I wanted to show the kids some classic ads from when I was their age – the KFC ad with Hugo and the girl in the back of the car, the ‘I’d like to buy the world a Coke’ ad, and the Goodnight Kiwi. It’s all there. I missed the last episode of Stylistas the other week, so what did I do? I watched it over five videos on YouTube.

I sometimes wish I could catch the news on TV during the day, but I want to be in the kitchen washing dishes or something useful. I’m looking forward to when IPTV becomes more prevalent, so I can watch local channels from wherever I am in the house. I do have a lovely big TV, but I’m pretty busy and I seldom take the time to sit down and watch it. And anyway, I’d have to fight the kids off watching Wipeout (urgh!).

However, I am finding with so much going on (I’ve just seriously got into one of the apps on Facebook, and so has my son), we are racking up the gigabytes of broadband traffic. If I ever get that video editing business going, I’m going to have to seriously look at some bigger pipes, probably SDSL because leased line is still not affordable, as we’re forever exceeding our monthly ASDL allocation, and upload speeds, if I’m posting to my blogs or uploading graphics content, are not great.

So, it’s a changing world we live in, but a fun one.

When is smacking a child not violent?

2009-08-21T03:02:00.002+01:00

The debate over whether parents may hit their children has resurfaced in New Zealand.

In 2007 New Zealand law was amended to make it a criminal offense to use force on a child, removing the statutory defence of ‘reasonable force’, but gave police discretion to not prosecute in cases where the offense is considered inconsequential.

A citizen’s initiated referendum is purporting to challenge that law change by asking the question, ‘should a smack, as part of good parental correction, be a criminal offence?’

An opinion poll earlier in the week resulted in more than 80% of respondents stating that no, a smack should not be a criminal offense. The results of the referendum are currently being tallied, but both sides of the debate expect the outcome to be a majority of votes of ‘no’.

The trouble with opinion polls and referenda is that the people most likely to respond at the ones who care passionately about the subject matter. So the people that care most about whether or not children should be smacked are the ones that want to smack them, it seems. It also probably means that a lot of other New Zealanders are unsure. Certainly the wording of the referendum question didn’t help make things clear, and both the Prime Minister and leader of the Opposition stated they would not be voting. The question was “Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offense?” Bit of a conundrum, really, as even answering the question could be seen as accepting that smacking can be part of ‘good’ parental correction.

I don’t understand why, when there is so much scientific research warning of the dangers of using force against children, those in favour of hitting a child trot out the arguments of ‘common sense’. ‘Smacking children is not harmful’, lawyer Ruby Harrold-Claesson declaimed back in 2006 when the Bill was being debated. She goes on to assert that smacking a 16-year-old who has thrown an axe at a younger sibling, or smacking a 15-year-old who has pushed her mother down the stairs (these incidents are apparently true), is not violence. I confess, the hair on the back of my neck prickled reading these statements. If these are not violent situations, I don’t know what kind of family environment Ms Harrold-Claesson comes from. This is advocating meeting violence with more violence. This is trying to assert control over nearly fully-grown people (how do you smack a 16-year-old?) with aggression. When is smacking not violent?

On the other side of the debate are the results of international research by psychologists and researchers that has consistently shown that smacking leads to “poorer mental health, diminished problem-solving skills, aggressive and delinquent behaviours, and impaired parent-child relationships’. Certainly the relationships described by Ms Harrold-Claesson seem impaired.

Clinging to the belief that use of violence against children can be justified because it is necessary for parental correction is an excuse to avoid moving on to more effective forms of parenting, brought about by a lack of education. There are better way to parent than by hitting your child.

Funny ads

2009-08-20T11:35:00.002+01:00

Some more strange and wonderful words from the world of local advertising.

For sale: an antique desk suitable for lady with thick legs and large drawers.
Wanted: Unmarried girls to pick fresh fruit and produce at night.
Have several very old dresses from grandmother in beautiful condition.
If you think you've seen everything in Paris, visit the Pere Lachasis Cemetery. It boasts such immortals as Moliere, Jean de la Fontain, and Chopin.
Sheer stockings. Designed for fancy dress, but so serviceable that lots of women wear nothing else.
Man, honest. Will take anything.
Modular Sofas. Only $299. For rest or fore play.
Our experienced Mom will care of your child. Fenced yard, meals, and smacks included.
Illiterate? Write today for free help.
And now, the Superstore--unequaled in size, unmatched in variety, unrivaled inconvenience.
Get rid of aunts: Zap does the job in 24 hours.
Remember in prayer the many who are sick of our church and community.
Tuesday at 4:00 PM there will be an ice cream social. All ladies giving milk will please come early.
The service will close with "Little Drops of Water." One of the ladies will start quietly and the rest of the congregation will join in.
At the evening service tonight, the sermon topic will be "What is Hell?" Come early and listen to our choir practice.

Top Gear Car Chooser

2009-08-20T03:53:00.000+01:00

I love Top Gear. I love Jeremy Clarkson’s overblown style. I love cars. And it all goes so well together.

Browsing the Top Gear website for car news the other day, I spotted this little catch-line: “Who says Top Gear doesn't do sensible car buying advice? Use this new interweb tool to find your next car. It's better than talking to a geek...”

Well, caught me. So I went for a look.

Bring on the Top Gear Car Chooser. Not exactly an inspirational name…

First off, you tick the boxes about what you want: fast, very fast, convertible, saloon, coupe, lots of seats. Choose as many as you like, then use the slider to choose your price range.

I decided to be silly and went for a very fast saloon in the £100 - £150K range (as opposed to my very slow MPV in the £5 - £10K range). Then I pressed the big, friendly button that said Now Press This, and was presented with a screen of options. I saw Porsches, Bentleys, Lamborghinis, Mercedes S-classes. Yum, yum. On the left are more sliders which allow you to tweak things like how much or how little comfort, emissions, handling and quality matter to you. So I slid the sliders. Much to my consternation, the Bentley kept percolating to the top. There was unfortunately no option for ‘has to look styley’, so I had to drop the comfort level to get rid of it.

Eventually I decided to ignore the top three that were being thrust at me (two Porsches and the Bentley, or if I eschewed all comfort, room, reasonable emissions and handling, an Audi) and chose two Ferraris, two Mercedes, an Aston Martin and a Lamborghini. Then I got lost – I should have been able to compare them somehow but my eyes were glazing over so I just read the reviews. I decided I love the Mercedes Benz SL-class, and was delighted to read on the review page that told me whoever had done the review (I’m believing it was JC) has one of his own. Scrolling to the bottom I noticed it did not give a rating for Running costs. All it said was: “It's a great-looking, expensive Mercedes, so expect group 20 insurance, high tax, high insurance, low mpg and rock-like residuals.”

Well, just for a laugh I might get a car insurance quote and see if it comes out higher than the value of my current car. I suspect it might.

What a very pleasant way to spend my half hour research time.

Schoolboy rugby brawl

2009-08-19T14:01:00.002+01:00

Is violence in sport trickling down to school level?

A weekend schoolboy rugby match between two of New Zealand’s prestigious schools has ended in an unseemly brawl that has focused attention on the role of teachers and coaches in encouraging violence in sport.

In a match watched by All Blacks coach Graham Henry, and New Zealand rugby great Wilson Whineray, the brawl broke out at the end of the 20-9 win to Auckland Grammar in the Auckland Secondary Schools semi-final against Kelston Boys. As well as players in the two teams, up to 100 spectators came onto the field and took part in the five minute ruckus.

Appropriate disciplinary action is being considered by Auckland Rugby Union, though Kelston Boys has already suspended seven of its players. One of the most disappointing aspects of the incident has been the finger pointing of the principals of both schools, each blaming the other schools’ players for starting the incident. This is little better than juvenile playground behaviour and very poor modelling for the students.

Manoj Daji, chief executive of College Sport Auckland, has blamed glamour coaches and teachers in Auckland for the increase in violence in school sports. Of ten incidents reported so far this year, he says nine can be attributed to poor behaviour of teachers, coaches or administrators.

“Right at the heart of [this issue] would have to be the discipline that is instilled in them [players] in the various schools, and that comes back down to the leadership in terms of the the tone set by the principal, the tone set by the coaches on the teams,” Mr Daji said.

Foreign bank accounts

2009-08-19T04:02:00.000+01:00

Once upon a time, the thought of having a foreign bank account was very exotic. It evoked ideas of Swiss accounts, James Bond, luxury lifestyles and so forth. But today, it’s a lot more mundane, accessible to the individual, and useful.

There are reasons for sending your money offshore than just to avoid tax. In fact, tax evasion is illegal, so that’s not a good reason at all. And it’s not the case that you can even necessarily avoid tax. Or need to.

Other reasons for having a foreign currency bank account include taking advantage of a more stable currency. If the pound, or more likely the New Zealand dollar, is behaving like a yo-yo, it’s quite handy to have some money stored safely overseas in a currency that is stable. Like India (believe it or not).

Also, other countries may offer better savings rates. With low interest rates on lending have come even lower interest rates for investment, not to mention the risk-averseness many have developed to higher-risk investments. So, you might want some money sitting in an account with a reputable, solid, safe bank overseas.

Lodging your money offshore does require you to do your homework, to make sure that what you intend to do is legal, that you legally declare whatever you need to declare in your home country, that you money doesn’t disappear into a big black hole, and that you will get what you are expecting, as different rules may apply overseas (different charges, how rates change and how changes are advised). You might like to consult a financial advisor, or even talk to a bank in your home country, as many of these have overseas offices.

Then get out the martini glasses, shake up the mix, and relax.

Kids’ fashion – where is it heading?

2009-08-18T10:25:00.001+01:00

There was an interesting article in today’s paper.

A Dad writing about what a disaster it is when he tries to dress his baby daughter. But he’s obviously not aiming for success, with comments like: “if there's one thing us blokes are sure to be worse at than the ladies it's getting the kids dressed.”

And of course, the support from Mum: “Oh no. What's daddy done to you” and “No. How 'bout something nice. Nana's coming to stay”

With that kind of attitude, it’s no wonder he’s hopeless. And I wonder who buys the clothes in the first place? Maybe him? Nah.

His final comment is interesting: “[when she’s a teenager] …over my dead body will she be walking out that door wearing a mini skirt...”

Good luck to him, I say. If minis are still in fashion then, if she’s not walking out the door in one, she’ll be hitching up the waistband once she’s out of sight.

Maybe Dads need to get more involved in their daughter’s fashion choices, if Mums are the ones that are dressing them like mini adults, or worse still, mini sex symbols. The sexualisation of our pre-teen and even younger girls is becoming big business and a big issue. The photo at the top of the article shows a shot of a well-known NZ designer’s kids’ couture at the NZ fashion week a couple of years ago. The clothes generally look fun, though I’m not sure how kid-friendly that double-breasted coat is. But it’s the little girl on the right that worries me – she’s posing coquettishly and appears to be hitching up her skirt. To show a little leg, perhaps? So, why is a four, maybe five-year-old girl wanting to show some leg?

Julie Gale is an Australian comedian who started a campaign against the sexualisation of children, and the delivery of sexual imagery to children in the media, advertising and clothing. Her movement, Kids Free 2B Kids, is a lobby group against the corporations that are targeting our children, particularly girls, particularly in the 8-12 year age group, with messages like “spend lots of money to look sexy and you’ll be popular.” The message hasn’t changed greatly over the years, but the age of the target audience is getting increasingly younger. This is not only about sexualisation of girls, but the message that the only relationship between boys and girls can be of a sexual nature. The psychological fall-out of that is huge.

Remortgaging or refinancing your mortgage

2009-08-18T06:26:00.001+01:00

There is quite a furore about home lending rates at present, and home owners might want to be looking around for better deals.

Remortgaging is the process of paying off an existing mortgage with the proceeds of a new one. Strictly speaking, this is with a new lender on an existing asset, but mortgage brokers and the public talk about remortgages both with an existing lender, or when switching to a new one.

The mortgage news is full of stories about mortgagee sales, but one way of easing the burden is to refinance at a better rate. But, there are a number of things to consider with remortgaging. The main reason for remortgaging is to get a better rate, particularly if you have come off a fixed rate period and are now on the lender’s Standard Variable Rate (SVR). Other reasons are to use some equity in your house, for example to make improvements, or due to marital separation.

But switching for a better rate may not be cost effective once all fees are taken into consideration. Breaking an existing mortgage agreement may incur some steep penalties. There are fees for discharging a mortgage and for drawing up a new agreement. Take care also if you have had financial difficulties – particularly if you have been declared bankrupt, as you are probably not able to access a standard mortgage, and you may have to take up a sub-prime mortgage (which usually have higher interest rates). The good news is that if you are able to pay reliably through the term of a sub-prime mortgage, you may be eligible for a standard mortgage thereafter.

Another thing to look out for is to ensure you have enough equity in your home to be able to refinance. The large loan-to-value ratios of past years have more or less gone – no more 125% mortgages. Most lenders will not exceed 80% LTV, so if you have less than 20% equity, you may not be able to take up a newer mortgage package.

The following is a list of things you should ask about, or your lender should tell you:

What remortgage deals are available and what should I be looking out for? Either your lender will provide you with this information, or you can consult a mortgage broker for help.
What rate of interest will my product carry? And for a capped or fixed term mortgage, the time period that applies.
How much will I save, if anything, on my new mortgage rate? Your lender should make it clear the difference between what you are paying now, and what you will be paying.
What is the standard variable rate (SVR) that the mortgage will revert to? While this may change in future, the current rate allows you to compare amongst lenders.
What are the new monthly repayments? Your lender should work out for you exactly what your monthly repayments will be, and what you will be paying once your fixed term or capped mortgage period finishes.
What is an annual percentage rate (APR)? This is meant to provide an annualised rate of the true cost of the loan, allowing customers to compare, but unfortunately is highly unreliable.
Are there any early redemption charges (ERCs) or exit penalties? This is very important. Your lender should make it clear what penalties will be charged if you break your agreement early. These can be substantial – for instance, some banks will require you to pay the amount of interest left to the end of the original agreement.
Does the mortgage carry any arrangement fees? Fees can substantially eat into any savings you make by remortgaging. Make sure you know what they are.
How long will the whole remortgage process take? Ask your lenders how long the process will take, especially if you are switching.
Can I remortgage more than once? You can remortgage as often as you like, but you will have to pay fees each time.

Amusing advice

2009-08-17T11:39:00.003+01:00

I was researching my story about bathrooms when I came across this wonderful page of dos and don’ts about shower enclosures. The advice is written in a very personal, chatty manner, not at all what you might expect from a professional organisation. But it has delightful appeal – basically, it’s charming. Here are some excerpts:

Towel Bar and Handle Warning
Towel bars and handles are not to be used as grab bars.

For many people, grab bars in showers are a great assistance for getting in and out of the tub or shower. However, if your tub or shower enclosure is equipped with a towel bar, you should not use it as a grab bar. It will not support your weight. Do not hang from it. Do not stand on it. If you use excessive force, it could snap off, shatter your shower door, send glass everywhere, or do goodness knows what. If you have small children who love to hang on things, and you are often heard to call them “my little monkeys” (in an affectionate way, of course), it's probably a good idea to instruct them not to hang from the towel bar. However, your towels and washcloths should be quite happy hanging from the towel bars.

There is a lot of “goodness knows what” and “[xyz] can cause all sorts of trouble.” Not exactly quantifiable, but you get the picture, n’est-ce pas?

And for goodness sake…

Warning about Opening & Closing Your Shower Door
Do not use excessive force when opening & closing your Shower Enclosure.

All of us at some point get angry. Some people are physically strong, some are naturally aggressive. If you use excessive force when opening or closing your Shower Enclosure, you could shatter the glass. I mean, it is glass for goodness sake.

Er, yep.

This bit was really frustrating…

Glass Obscurity Warning
Make sure to consider all the important factors when selecting the obscurity level of your glass.

It's expensive to change your glass after your shower enclosure is installed, so we recommend that you consider all the factors that could be important to you. Do you own a mountain cabin, and have a lovely view through the enclosure out the window? In that case you might consider clear glass to be your best option. Do you prefer a certain degree of privacy when showering? Perhaps an obscure pattern would be right for you. Is your shower enclosure the showpiece of your master bathroom? You might consider using Art Glass. And, of course, we all remember the gorilla story.

No we don’t! What gorilla story? If anyone knows, please tell me, because I’m dying of curiosity.

But the finish is the best of all, and left a big smile on my dial…

Warning to People who Fish
If you are cleaning fish in the shower, we recommend that you thoroughly remove all fish innards and sanitize your enclosure soon as you are finished. [ewww]

Not doing so can cause all sorts of trouble [my emphasis], especially if your have a significant other who is about to shower and doesn't appreciate the fine aroma of freshly caught & cleaned fish.

Too right, mate, cos she just might wrap some of those innards around your neck and squeeze.

So, a bit of sage advice about looking after your shower enclosure. If you want to read the whole lot, go here.

Showers

2009-08-17T07:12:00.001+01:00

Having recently installed a new bathroom, I did quite a bit of research into showers.

The bathroom had room for a stand-alone shower but no bath, so we looked at a variety of shower enclosures, and we were hoping to do something to improve the hot water system. This proved to be slightly tricky, but we came up with a good solution finally.

First to the enclosure – having previously had a rather unpleasant wooden cabinet lined with formica-covered MDF, the prospect of a nice, spacious, clean, light shower cubicle was certainly appealing. And this is what we got. Glass enclosed, with handy moulded shelves and ladies’ footrest for shaving, it’s a pleasure to be in. No danger from moulds as yet unknown to medical science breeding in the corners, no paint flakes when it’s cleaned, and no piddly showery dribble from the shower head.

To keep it looking nice, we make the effort to squeegee it off with one of those rubber window scraper things after every shower, and we wipe down the chrome (there’s not a lot of it). We’re careful not to use abrasive chemicals when cleaning, and we clean regularly, though not obsessively (once every month or two). It’s not as onerous or life threatening as cleaning the old shower.

One thing we were adamant about was improving the water flow. We looked at electric showers, but decided to go the whole hog and instantly heat all our hot water with a gas hot water system. The savings made by not having a cylinder sitting around full of hot water will pay for the cost of the installation in a year or two. The principle is basically the same as for an electric shower, but heats all your hot water. If you do not have access to gas, electricity can be used for heating as well.

The trickiest element was the change from our piddly, dribbly low pressure hot water system to full mains pressure. Initially, the water pressure nearly blew us out of the shower, but luckily this was fixed by installation of a low flow shower head. The shower itself has two pressure settings, so if we do want a massage, we can use the higher setting, but normally I use the low setting.

A bus lane through my heart

2009-08-15T01:40:00.002+01:00

Which is more important – pedestrian areas or making the buses more efficient?

This question has been considered by Wellington City councillors and they have come down in favour of the buses. Much to the consternation of some pedestrians. But opinion is divided.

The Save Manners Mall campaign

is attempting to change their minds,

with posters here and there to advise

people of what’s going on.

The Manners Mall emo song poignantly (if a little flatly) laments the move.

It’s difficult to know whether it’s a good move or not – it’s the battle of the environmentally friendly options.

I don’t like banks just now

2009-08-14T09:18:00.000+01:00

Banks are not the most popular institutions in the world at present.

Here’s a quick summary of the last decade or so. It began with several years spent creaming huge profits through borrowing money to invest, paying out obscene bonuses to executives for securing the huge profits, while lending money to people who couldn’t afford to repay it, and charging everyday customers rude amounts for looking after their money. While perhaps stopping short of collusion, certainly keeping an eye on what all the other banks are doing and following suit, so no-one steps out of line. Customers face a country-full of generic banks with nothing to differentiate them. Same old home loans, same old methods to open bank accounts, same old difficulty in changing your address, same old poor customer service. Banks large enough to screw you and small enough to not care.

These were the good times. They were followed by a rapid dose of reality as many of those people who were loaned money they couldn’t really afford, suddenly realised they were better off walking out of their homes than trying to repay a loan that was bigger than the value of their house. The money lent was all gone into the pockets of the people who sold their overvalued houses. Probably turned into offshore finance and sitting in an account in the Cayman Islands. But the executive bonuses kept being paid and the speculation and use of vaporous financial instruments continued.

Until suddenly there was no more credit, because the banks whose customers walked out on their loans were a bad risk, and the whole sector was a bad risk, and no-one was handing out money much at all. And banks who had borrowed lots of money to invest had to pay that borrowed money back and guess what, they didn’t have it. Trouble in paradise.

So the banks squealed, and the banks hollered, and the governments, who also relied on the banks, decided they’d better bail out the banks, because if the banks fell over, well, who knows what would happen? Yes indeed, if the banks went under, they would take with them all the money their customers entrusted them with, which they had ‘invested’. Which in itself is fine, it’s what banks do, but what isn’t fine is if they overreach themselves and get greedy, borrowing even more to invest.

And the governments paid out billions to the banks to keep them afloat, but people still lost their jobs and their homes as the banks scrabbled for more money, and people stopped spending, so businesses had to let people go. And it all got very hard.

Now the banks, it seems, are trying various tricks to pretend they’re all fine again, showing healthy profits on paper that have only accounting trickery behind them. And lo and behold, those clever old executives are still getting their healthy bonuses. Some banks in the US have handed out more in bonuses to their executives, than the profit they made. Bet that’ll make the shareholders happy. And all those people who have lost their jobs because of the banking crisis. And the taxpayers who have funded the billion-dollar bail outs.

Fun with English

2009-08-13T12:19:00.002+01:00

The people who wrote the following advertisements in local newspapers had an interesting grasp on the English language.

A superb and inexpensive restaurant. Fine food expertly served by waitresses in appetizing forms.
Now is your chance to have your ears pierced and get an extra pair to take home, too.
For Sale -- Eight puppies from a German Shepperd and an Alaskan Hussy.
Dog for sale: eats anything and is fond of children.
The hotel has bowling alleys, tennis courts, comfortable beds, and other athletic facilities.
We build bodies that last a lifetime.
Man wanted to work in dynamite factory. Must be willing to travel.
Wanted. Man to take care of cow that does not smoke or drink.
Auto Repair Service. Free pick-up and delivery. Try us once, you'll never go anywhere again.
Mixing bowl set designed to please a cook with round bottom for efficient beating.
Girl wanted to assist magician in cutting-off-head illusion. Blue Cross and salary.
Don't let worry kill you -- let the church help.
The rosebud on the alter this morning is to announce the birth of David Alan Belzer, the sin of Rev. and Mrs. Julius Belzer.
Thursday at 5:00 PM there will be a meeting of the Little Mothers Club. All ladies wishing to be "Little Mothers" will meet with the Pastor in his study.
The ladies of the church have cast off clothing of every kind. They can be seen in the church basement Saturday.

Talking CCTV

2009-08-13T04:55:00.000+01:00

An interesting application of CCTVs has been the combination of camera and loudspeaker, creating a ‘talking’ CCTV. Big Brother is not only watching, he’s talking as well.

CCTV systems have been in use for a number of years. Uses include monitoring for security, in plant such as warehouses, banks and private homes or estates, and also for monitoring behaviour in public areas, a usage very common in the UK.

But a few years ago Middlesbrough installed CCTV cameras equipped with loudspeakers, which have been used to instruct people to stop anti-social behaviour in the streets. Other areas have installed the loudspeaker enhancements, with support from the government.

There is divided opinion over whether this is a further infringement of civil liberties, or a good idea to keep streets and town centres safe.

The ability to ‘speak’ to infringers seems to have made a difference. Either taped messages or operators speaking directly to the public have admonished people who are dropping litter, riding bicycles in pedestrian areas, and starting fights.

Two men who started fighting ran off in opposite directions when an operator told them to stop. A young man riding his bicycle through a pedestrian area was asked to get off and walk. He looked horrified as he realised the message was intended for him, and complied promptly.

And a couple was even spotted having sex in a town centre in Northampton Borough. The embarrassed pair, who had probably been drinking, fled the scene.

Bathroom upgrades

2009-08-12T05:32:00.001+01:00

Upgrading bathrooms may not be as simple as it seems. Understanding your space and planning are important tasks to undertake.

I was recently involved in upgraded a townhouse bathroom. Working in an area where everything is designed to be compact and save space restricts the options you have. Still, by thinking creatively, and always keeping in mind what we wanted to achieve, we did achieve a fantastic result.

Starting with the floor, we stripped back to the basic wood – a lovely, warm, rich brown wood called rimu, a New Zealand native. We stripped back all the materials that over the years had been used to cover up the original tongue and groove floor, such as particle board, a million tacs, and lino, and had the exposed wood sanded and varnished to a grade to deal with the expected bathroom wetness level.

Because our wood has so much warmth and character, we were advised to paint the walls brilliant white, to replace the previous yellow. I was concerned that this would prove too cold, but it harmonised beautifully with the wooden floor, and provided the perfect background for splashes of colour introduced by our bathroom accessories.

We chose to keep the wood theme and had to have installations, such as our vanity, custom-built to fit the space restrictions. We also could choose only one type of toilet due to the plumbing construction, but stuck to the basics of pure white porcelain. I have a great weakness for way out toilet seats, so we currently have a deep, blue acrylic seat inlaid with shells and star fish, but if the novelty ever wears off, this can be replaced by a good quality white seat.

The shower we chose is a metre-by-metre corner unit with rounded glass doors, opening into the centre of the room and avoiding the feeling of being shut in a corner, especially to move in and out. My elderly mother stays with us occasionally and appreciates the ease with which she can access the shower. The size of the cubicle is ample, and the moulded corner shelves and even a ladies’ footrest (for shaving) mean there are no sharp corners.

A skilled and experienced plumber did the tricky fitting work for us, and ensured we had a top class job done, minimising the risk of leaks, especially from the shower pan. Our plumber, who has worked in the UK and New Zealand, advised us to use local materials where possible, and to avoid cheap imported fittings, as they are not likely to last as long and not be designed for our conditions. Buying cheap products is false economy, unless you wish to change more often – and then you must be prepared to pay the greater price over time. Our plumber also insists on safety glass in showers, and refuses to install shower cubicles that do not have this.

Our bathroom has very much been kept to the three basic colours – the warm brown of wooden floor, vanity, doors, and skirting boards, the white of walls and porcelain, and the occasional chrome of taps and other plumbing items. This gives us the flexibility to change accessories to suit our mood – colourful towels and bathmats, soap and toothbrush containers, even the toilet seat. We currently have a rose quartz light shade and a silver metal white box-framed mirror to complete our look.

Cultural misunderstanding?

2009-08-11T22:11:00.000+01:00

Last week was a historical one in New Zealand politics.

Taito Philip Field has the dubious honour of being New Zealand’s first politician convicted of bribery and corruption charges. The former junior Immigration Minister in the Labour Government was stood down in 2005 after allegations that he had had work done on his homes in New Zealand and Samoa by Thai nationals seeking to immigrate to New Zealand, in return for his help with their immigration applications.

Then Prime Minister Helen Clark ordered a judicial enquiry into the allegations against Field, which eventually came up with enough fodder to turn the matter over to police. Police began their own enquiry, and charged Field with 40 counts of bribery and obstructing the course of justice.

But is Field just a victim of cultural misunderstanding? In Field’s Samoan culture, as in many others, the practice of giving and receiving (lafo) is well established, and to refuse a reciprocal gift is seen as insulting. However, the prosecution in the Field trial argued that the Thais who did him favours were doing them, not for him (to reciprocate), but to enhance their own chances of achieving ‘Heaven’ in their next life. Accepting this sort of gift is commonly seen in the West as corruption.

Had Field been treating with Polynesians who shared his cultural standards, an argument for the application of lafo may have held, but in dealing with a different culture this is not so – refusing the reciprocation would not have caused the same offence. So the question was whether Field was naïve, or was he fully aware that his dealings, and the fact that he gained advantage from the use of his position, would be seen as corrupt. His enthusiastic attempts to obstruct enquiry into his actions would seem to indicate the latter.

On reflection, appointing Field to such a contentious and corruption-prone arena as Immigration may have been unwise, especially for someone in the spotlight as New Zealand’s first Pacific Islands MP. It is natural for MPs and even Ministers (who are often still constituency MPs) to help their constituents, and in Field’s case, his constituency was much wider than the Mangere (Auckland) electorate he took over from the late David Lange. He would have been under constant pressure from petitioners intent on bettering their lives by immigrating to New Zealand, and struggling with complex rules and regulations often in a language with which they are not familiar. However, despite the requirements of his Pacific culture, as a New Zealand MP and Minister, Field had an obligation to uphold the New Zealand culture that dictates our public servants must not give favours unfairly, and even in the course of their egalitarian support of constituents, cannot profit from that support.

Never cheaper to insure

2009-08-11T06:05:00.000+01:00

It’s never been cheaper to insure your life. Life is cheap, and getting cheaper.

The cost of cost of life insurance has been steadily decreasing and is now at an all-time low. There are a number of reasons for that.

People are living longer, and fewer life insurance policies are actually cashed in. Medicine has advanced and our life expectancy is longer than ever. We’re seeing prevalence on certain diseases increasing but that doesn’t mean we’re less healthy, it actually means that in the past, people died of something else before they were old enough to get these diseases. For example, prostrate cancer and other cancers.

There have been a number of health scares in the last few decades, beginning with the so-called AIDS epidemic which began in the 1980s and totally failed to wipe out significant portions of humankind. More recently we’ve had Sars, Avian flu, and the latest nasty – swine flu or H1N1. None has as yet cut swathes through the world’s population. No comfort to the families of those who did succumb.

So less payout means lower premiums.

Also, life insurance has got more competitive. No longer do you get if from your mortgage company or a nice man in a nice suit who knocks on your door. Insurance is big business, and a quick browse of the web will provide you with access to not only all the insurance in your area, but also to sites that have done the hard work for you, and compare companies and policies and benefits. There are sites full of full of life insurance news, and sites that report on life insurance companies, what they get up to, and their financial performance.

So even with all this doom and gloom of recession and global pandemic, life insurance companies are telling us there is no better time to be alive.

AWOL

2009-08-11T01:28:00.000+01:00

The mountains call and the snow is sparkling, and I wish I was there, but I wasn’t. I was cleaning the bathroom and filling in government forms. Seems to have taken all week. Oops.

Back now, though, so tune in a little later for my awesomely insightful commentary.

ttfn.

Rift over UK banking reforms

2009-07-31T10:35:00.000+01:00

The UK administration is working hard at defining needs for changes to the UK banking system, to avoid the dramas of two years ago, but the solution is not as simple as just implementing a few changes.

There appears to be a significant rift forming with regard to changes required for the regulation of the UK banking sector, to avoid a systemic failure as was evidenced in 2007. A report released today by the Treasury select committee expressed concerns about the way in which the government is pursuing reform, based on the white paper recently put forward by chancellor Alastair Darling, in which proposed reforms to the sector are seen as little more than cosmetic.

The white paper, released early in July, calls for a ‘health warning system’ similar to those for fatty foods and tobacco products. The chancellor is looking for improved regulation, better management of banks and a better deal for consumers. Lord Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Authority, has made 27 recommendations to avoid another systemic failure of the sector, and Darling intends to implement them all, though he is likely to acknowledge that it will not be possible to implement them all at once. One of Darling’s main concerns is that the consolidation of the banking industry since 2007 has lessened appetite for competition in the sector. Competition has indeed been weak due to the stranglehold of the major players.

The Treasury select committee has condemned the government’s approach as merely endorsing the present system with only minor changes, and not considering the remedies required to prevent the kind of reckless practices that lead to the current crisis.

The committee’s main concern, however, appears to be with the dysfunctional nature of the relationships within the tripartite group set up to oversee banking reforms. The group consists of the Bank of England, the Financial Services Authority, and Treasury. The Treasury select committee, in its report released today, said it was “…extremely perturbed by the evidence from the governor of the Bank of England that he was kept in the dark over the contents of the white paper to the extent that he had ‘no idea’ what it would contain, or even when it would be published…”

When questioned by select committee chairman (see comments beginning 10.08am) John McFall, Prime Minister Gordon Brown dodged questions related to the exclusion of the governor, Mervyn King, from the development of the paper, and made no comment on McFall’s assertion that the tripartite group had no cohesion.

It is not clear, in news reports, where King differs in opinion from the proposals in the white paper, except insofar as the select committee declared the government should not be allowing banks to grow “too big to fail”, but ensuring instead that there are no banks that are “too big to save.”

Business broadband

2009-07-30T23:46:00.000+01:00

Broadband is the norm for internet connection these days, business broadband even more so. There are several types of connection. They are:

Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL)
Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line (SDSL), and
Leased Line

ADSL is fine for residential users, who generally do not have much in the way of upload requirement. An ADSL line downloads at reasonable speeds (or capacity, depending on how you look at it), but uploads at about 10% of that (hence the ‘asymmetry’). SDSL has a much higher upload speed, but because the download speed is the same (‘symmetry’), it is slower than ADSL. Both SDSL speeds are reasonable for small to medium-sized businesses. Leased lines have far greater upload and download speeds, but cost a lot more.

If you run a business, there is no longer any question regarding whether to have broadband or not, but rather, how fast can it go. Speeds range from a measly 64kB to a peak of 2mB. There are a number of 2mB leased line providers in the market. One, Vaioni, is offering 2mB at an expensive monthly cost, but is justifying this with 99.95% SLA, virtually guaranteeing the speed.

So whatever you require, make sure you do your homework. There are many broadband providers in the market, so being well informed will help you make the right decision.

Bucking the trend

2009-07-30T12:15:00.000+01:00

One of New Zealand’s leading economists has scoffed at doomsayers who are predicting the country’s housing market is yet set to fall 30-40%.

Tony Alexander, the Bank of New Zealand’s chief economist, believes the fall in house prices has done its dash and the market is ready to resume rising, albeit at a substantially slower rate than in the last seven or so years.

Pressures such as above average population growth, below average interest rates and a shortage of housing will push prices back up, writes Alexander. New Zealand has probably escaped the worst of the property storm, as seen overseas. This may be due to more responsible lending practices – as far as I know, we do not have a significant equivalent to the US sub-prime market. There are certainly inexperienced investors who have overcapitalised in the hope of grabbing quick gains, and with rising unemployment some of these may be forced to shed their investments. There are certainly more mortgagee sales in evidence, but nothing like in some parts of the world (50% in California, for example).

A key for New Zealand will be the reestablishment, or improvement of our export markets. As long as we can earn overseas income, businesses will be able to employ staff and support local firms. Confidence regarding growth of our overseas markets has improved, though from a negative base, and this is a trend that must continue, and of course be borne out in reality.

Saving versus investment

2009-07-29T07:23:00.001+01:00

In our tattered economic environment, it’s good to understand some things we can do with our money, should we be fortunate enough to still have some.

Saving versus investment are two different things. Savings are money put aside to protect it from loss, whereas investment is about using your money to make money. The danger with investment is, of course, that you can lose your money too, but that is a known hazard. As we have seen, it’s possible to lose savings too, but that’s more because of poor banking practice.

The New Zealand stock exchange (NZX) has a very good article about investment that explains, in simple language, the various different things you need know. It covers off the basics such as stocks, bonds and equities, and explains some of the more complex things such as what causes share prices to fluctuate, and the difference between capital gain and dividend income.

It is worth reading up about investment in a good investment news forum. Keeping abreast of goings on in the market will help you make informed decisions.

There are many different ways of making the best of your money. You can tuck it away in a high interest savings account. Offshore banking is one way to save a bit on tax payments, and to keep your money safe from liability. You can open an offshore savings account, but it needs to be with a reputable bank. Do check out the legal implications, though, as Inland Revenue can’t be pleased about people taking their money offshore and will be looking to get their tax take if they can.

Banks and investment companies offer a variety of investment packages, up and down the scale of risk. I view these as sort of ‘TV dinners’, where everything is done for you, and you have a balanced portfolio of investment, some risky and some very safe.

At the other extreme, you can do your own research and choose where to invest your money. It is sometimes helpful to choose one or two industries, so you may choose to choose to invest in agriculture and the IT industry. It’s good to choose industries that aren’t substantially inter-dependent, so that if one goes wrong, it doesn’t affect the other.

Advertising funnies

2009-07-29T06:03:00.002+01:00

The following are amusing ads from local US and other newspapers.

Dinner Special -- Turkey $2.35; Chicken or Beef $2.25; Children $2.00.
Wanted: 50 girls for stripping machine operators in factory.
Great Dames for sale.
Vacation Special: have your home exterminated.
Toaster: A gift that every member of the family appreciates. Automatically burns toast.
For Rent: 6-room hated apartment.
Used Cars: Why go elsewhere to be cheated? Come here first!
3-year-old teacher need for pre-school. Experience preferred.
Holcross pullets. Starting to lay Betty Clayton, Granite 5-6204.
Semi-Annual after-Christmas Sale.
For Sale. Three canaries of undermined sex.
Thursday night - Potluck supper. Prayer and medication to follow.
This afternoon there will be a meeting in the South and North ends of the church. Children will be baptized at both ends.
This being Easter Sunday, we will ask Mrs. Lewis to come forward and lay an egg on the altar.
A bean supper will be held on Tuesday evening in the church hall. Music will follow.

Rent or buy?

2009-07-28T11:52:00.001+01:00

People are wondering if it’s a good time to buy property again. In other words, has the market hit rock bottom. Some pundits seem to think not.

The government is pumping money into building new houses, which will go some way towards improving things in the construction industry, but is not likely to push prices up. Quite the opposite, in fact. The property news is full of articles about tiny increases in prices, interspersed with articles about how the market may take between three and eleven years to recover.

Property prices look set to remain static for a while. This recession will take a long time to work out. Consumer confidence is at an all-time low and the comparison to the Depression of the 1930s is being made more often. In fact, the 1930s Depression took only three or four years to work itself out. This one has been going for two years now, with no strong indication of improvement.

Real estate forums are still busy, the industry is certainly not about to go under, though it has lost a lot of people. But this is the case for many industries, such as building and construction. Other businesses are experiencing the flow-on effects of the drop in the export sector, and many are restructuring. Job losses are mounting, and those who took advantage of 100% home loans offered by the banks a year or two ago may now find that even the drop in interest rates (assuming they were able to take advantage of them) is not enough to stave off financial ruin. So there has been an increase in mortgagee sales. Some home owners are being forced into quick house sales, needing to convert their property into cash as fast as possible. This means they are likely to lose a substantial amount of value of their investment.

Some of those not prepared to sell at a discounted amount are hanging on to their asset and attempting to rent it out. This is beginning to show in decreased rents, which is good news for those renting. The over-inflated housing market has made rents very good value in the last decade, and this trend looks set to continue.

So all in all, this doesn’t seem a good time to buy. The bottom line is, don’t get into debt. If it’s possible to buy outright, perhaps a modest investment is sensible, but there may well be better bargains around in a year or so.

The true effect of the recession

2009-07-27T12:47:00.000+01:00

What is the true effect of this recession? I wrote a while ago about the human side when real people lose real jobs, and what do they do then? Well, this is something Oprah has been looking at, and I watched the rerun today.

Multi-billion dollar stimulus packages and huge bonuses for finance sector executives gall when you see ordinary families reduced to walking the streets waiting for the homeless shelter to open.

Reporter Lisa Ling went to her hometown, Sacramento, which just five years ago was considered to be one of the fastest growing cities in the US. Now, it has a serious problem with homelessness.

Lisa highlights the plights of a number of families. The first is a woman and her three children, who have to walk the streets by day on the weekend, carrying their possessions in plastic rubbish bags, waiting for the night homeless shelter to open. Her husband is staying with friends and looking for work. A year ago this family lived in their own condo, drove a car, and both parents had jobs. Then they both lost their jobs, their adjustable mortgage rate went through the roof, and they could no longer afford to keep their home. Around 50% of all house sales in California are currently foreclosures by banks. The family moved into a rented house, but basically ran out of money.

Lisa Lang also looked at what happens to foreclosed homes. She talks to John Cloaker, a man who runs a very successful business, clearing out houses that have been left by people where the banks have foreclosed (click here for download video). Many of these are new homes in estates, where the purchaser is a subprime borrower. Some people leave everything behind – computers, televisions, children’s toys. Often the ex-owner just cannot afford to have their things moved or stored.

The tragedy is that the items left in the houses can only be dumped, because otherwise Cloaker’s company cannot keep up with the pace (up to 15 houses a day), so there isn’t time to preserve things. Furniture, bikes, clothes, dishes – all are thrown into wheelie bins and taken to the dump. Charity stores don’t have resources to collect everything.

This is a human tragedy. These people should never have been able to get so far into debt. They appear to be in a twilight zone of financial greed, where less choosy banks were willing to over-lend, and then when things got difficult, these banks ratcheted their interest rates up and suddenly the cashflow equation was looking very red. People are being thrown out of houses, they have nowhere else to go, the shelters are overflowing, and people are living on the streets. This is the Depression all over again.

Kids and bank accounts

2009-07-27T11:23:00.001+01:00

Kids and money don’t always mix well together. There are many tricky questions related to how old kids need to be to deal with various aspects of handling money.

My big question is, why do kids have no concept of saving? This is something that needs to be taught. I’m no great expert at finance matters and finance forums really bore me to sleep, so I’m probably not the best person to teach my kids. However, I’m probably the only person who is going to, so I’d best pull my socks up.

I give my kids pocket money – partly in cash and partly straight into their bank accounts. I consulted a money broker/financial advisor about what is appropriate for kids to be able to do with a bank account, with current accounts or savings accounts and so forth. His advice was to keep strict control until they are old enough to understand what money is and how to handle it.

However, he did say he believes kids don’t feel ownership of money, because their parents control so much about them getting it, and also to a large extent, how they spend it. He suggested showing kids the worthwhile aspects of savings, the accumulation of money towards a more substantial goal, but kids have short attention spans. Today’s savings accounts pay next to nothing in interest, so there’s no incentive for kids to save.

So how do we teach them? One thing we can do is be a bank for them. We can set up our own ‘bank of mum and dad’, and introduce them to the concepts of saving, interest and planning for the future. This is easy to keep track of if you have even just basic software, such as a spreadsheet application.

~

By the way, I need to find out more about foreign currency bank accounts. I would like to hedge against a drop in the UK pound, because while I work in NZ, I get paid by a UK company in British pounds. The exchange rate is so variable that it makes it difficult to know what I’m going to get paid, week by week. But is it even possible to open an account in another country without being resident there?

Surveillance – good thing or bad thing

2009-07-24T12:37:00.000+01:00

Is surveillance a good thing or a bad thing? Well, I guess I depends on its purpose.

On the first Monday of the school holidays, I arrived at school at 8am to kick off the holiday programme I was running. The first thing I noticed as I walked into the grounds was 2 metre high graffiti on the end of the main classroom block. As I walked around the school, I saw more and more graffiti. Our school had been done over.

In the next few weeks a lot of money, time, energy and paint were spent in covering over the colours that defaced our buildings. The cost, for a school that is already struggling for money, is tremendous, and it’s tragic that it had to be spent to put right the scribblings of a bunch of narcissistic teenagers.

The popular thinking is that Britain is a ‘surveillance society’, and this is held up as a bad thing. Here in New Zealand we are far more resistant to centralised control and CCTV systems and surveillance are not so common.

But I’m thinking that CCTV might have been a good thing for our school. The police had better things to do than chase up a supposedly victimless crime, but a visual of the crims may have helped them, especially if the youngsters were already known.

The school engages a security company but they only monitor alarms, not disturbances in the grounds. With CCTV, security companies can provide faster and more accurate responses. Sure, it costs more, but if it can stop a graffiti attack like the one we suffered, it will pay for itself.

Almost but not quite entirely on another subject, I’m wondering what the purpose of call recording is. Companies you call are obliged to let you know that your call is being recorded, and for what purpose. Which is fair enough. But they all seem to say it’s for training. I’m sure there must be other reasons. Such as having a record of who said what in case of a dispute, maybe. Just seems odd there are never any other reasons given. It’s not something that bothers me particularly, as I can’t imagine recorded conversation being used for nefarious purposes.

Funny personals

2009-07-23T07:36:00.002+01:00

Here’s a few personal ads from local newspapers in the US and around the world.

Lost: small apricot poodle. Reward. Neutered. Like one of the family.
Four-poster bed, 101 years old. Perfect for antique lover.
We do not tear your clothing with machinery. We do it carefully by hand.
Tired of cleaning yourself? Let me do it.
Mt. Kilimanjaro, the breathtaking backdrop for the Serena Lodge. Swim in the lovely pool while you drink it all in.
Stock up and save. Limit: one.
Wanted: chambermaid in rectory. Love in, $200 a month. References required.
Wanted: Hair-cutter. Excellent growth potential.
Our bikinis are exciting. They are simply the tops.
Wanted. Widower with school-age children requires person to assume general housekeeping duties. Must be capable of contributing to growth of family.
We will oil your sewing machine and adjust tension in your home for $1.00.
Christmas tag-sale. Handmade gifts for the hard-to-find person.
For those of you who have children and don't know it, we have a nursery downstairs.
Wednesday the ladies liturgy will meet. Mrs. Johnson will sing “Put me in my little bed” accompanied by the pastor.
Next Sunday a special collection will be taken to defray the cost of the new carpet. All those wishing to do something on the new carpet will come forward and do so.

Asian property market report

2009-07-23T01:47:00.000+01:00

Property around the world has been affected differently by this recession. In New Zealand and the UK, the market seems to be, or to have been on the decline and is now perhaps holding steady. There have been faint glimmers of recovery, but that may be optimism (or desperation) on the part of estate agents.

The Asian region comprises many different nations, which include different cultures, systems of government and standards of living. The property market throughout Asia has therefore been affected differently.

The Singapore market has been falling dramatically since the start of this year, and there is speculation that the Japanese market will hit rock bottom next year and be rife for buyers. Indian prices have also been falling, but may be picking up, though developers are being accused of being greedy by putting up prices as interest rekindles, risking stalling the turn-around.

Philippines real estate is currently holding its own, but predictions are that the recession will cause UK and US companies to recall their expats towards the end of this year, leaving a glut of unwanted luxury apartments in the major cities, such as Manila.

Conversely, China is experiencing strong recovery, accompanied with warnings to banks not to over-lend (buyers in China are required to furnish a 40% deposit). Nepal is in a mini-boom as wealthy Nepalese are looking for safe places to keep their money, and prices in Vietnam are soaring.

So there is certainly a varied picture coming out of Asia. There are opportunities to be had for the wise investor but the main lesson to be learned from the recent US fiasco is to ensure you have tangible assets and to not over-reach or over-gear.

School governance

2009-07-22T12:04:00.000+01:00

Schools in New Zealand are government-funded, to a certain degree. There is a private school system also, but the majority are state funded.

But not state run, as such. In the 1980s, a model known as Tomorrow’s schools was set up by the government. It works on the principle of decentralised Boards of parent and teacher trustees running the school. There are guidelines provided by the central government agency (the Ministry of Education), and there is a national body (NZ School Trustees Association) that provides advice, training and advocacy, but by and large, schools are run by the principal, a staff representative and a small number of parent representatives. All but the principal are elected.

Schools are funded by the Ministry according to various formulae. The Ministry negotiates teacher salaries, so that all teachers are paid according to the same scale, regardless of the school at which they teach. They provide a grant which should cover all the operational aspects of running the school, such as electricity, consumables, non-teaching staff (such as office staff and caretakers), cleaning, relieving teachers and general maintenance.

The Ministry also owns the school land and buildings, and pays the school for capital improvements, again according to formulae governing the area of buildings allowed based on the size of the school roll.

The Trustees are responsible for setting the strategic direction of the school, determining what outcomes are desired, hiring teachers and the principal, and overseeing the work of the principal. The principal runs the school on a day-to-day basis, with teachers generally directly responsible to her (or to deans in larger schools). She is responsible for all aspects of school operation, from teaching direction and delivery, finances, building operation and maintenance, information technology, dealing with the public, working with parents and the school community, and representing the school in the wider education sector. Trustees have oversight of all these aspects, and are often also involved in fund raising.

The model works well in some areas, but can be challenging in areas where it is difficult to find skilled and willing Trustees. If a Board breaks down, either because of differences with the principal, or if student outcomes become unacceptable, the Ministry can suspend the Board and install a commissioner, who takes over the running of the school until such time as the same or a new Board can be instated.

Business broadband

2009-07-21T23:32:00.004+01:00

The world of the internet has made a huge difference to the way we do business. It has made for a more joined up world, and we are as likely to interact with people in Abu Dhabi as in our own neighbourhood.

Applications available to businesses in today’s IT world are becoming increasingly sophisticated. What used to be only for specialists, such as video sharing, voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing, has become standard fare for many companies.

But with this increasing sophistication comes the requirement for increasingly large data transfer capacity. Way back in the 1980s, when this whole business computing phenomenon was starting out, hard disk capacity was measured in kilobytes. Nowadays, we’re looking at a million times the capacity (gigabytes), though even that’s not enough and we’re on the threshold of the next step up, at a billion times the capacity of the humble kilobyte (terabytes).

So how do we ship these huge volumes of data out of the door of our business, to Abu Dhabi, Reykjavik and the Coromandel? Basically, we need pipes that can handle the volume, at a reasonable speed.

Mainstream ISPs such as BT and NZ Telecom, bless their cotton socks, are labouring under a hundred and more years of infrastructure. New Zealand’s ex-national carrier has just introduced their super-fast broadband.

Unfortunately, BT in the UK is not quite there, offering somewhat slow business broadband. Today’s businesses need something faster, like leased lines (very expensive) or the various digital subscriber line options (bonded ADSL, SDSL or bonded SDSL).

There are many broadband companies in the market, keeping BT honest and on their toes. There are also many ‘pipe’ options, with multitudes of leased line providers. Leased lines are a good quality option – they are fast, reliable, have huge capacity, but expensive. Business SDSL availability is increasing, however, as this viable alternative becomes more popular.

Best advice: understand what you need now and in the future, and shop around. There are deals to be had out there.

Mythbusters vs Engineering Connections

2009-07-21T12:13:00.000+01:00

Programmes about engineering feats are being featured tonight on the National Geographic channel. We’ve just seen an international crew of engineers and iron workers fit a 300 tonne engine into a refurbished cruise ship, in the space of less than three weeks.

Now Top Gear’s Richard Hammond is breaking out in his own series, and doing lots of engineering-related stuff. He’s at the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

Richard has just got some of the scientists to test out a theory. Greek mathematician and general smarty pants Archimedes, once towelled dry and re-clothed (presumably), apparently built an array of bronze mirrors and used it to focus the sun’s rays on an invading fleet of enemy Roman ships, setting them on fire.

The current-day test used a smallish mirror, about the size of a Sky satellite dish, and a dinghy-sized wooden boat shape. The mirror was focussed on the boat shape and eventually, the boat caught fire. They surmised that this supports the Archimedes story. The thing was, the mirror was about a metre away from the boat, and the boat was sitting on a frame on the ground (ie not moving). As Hammond pointed out, if Archimedes had been that close to the invading fleet, they would probably have got quite cross and have stabbed him.

I did a little bit of googling and discovered that the programme Mythbusters had already tackled this problem, and busted the myth. While in theory an array of mirrors could reflect the sun at a temperature of up to 600 degrees, the Mythbusters team could not generate more than 300 degrees, and this was not enough to set fire to the half-trireme they had built. Also, even to get the temperature of the wood of the ship to raise at all, it had to be about half the distance from shore. And finally, the temperature was raised only when the ship was not moving.

So, Archimedes had to have got the Roman fleet to park up a metre or so off the dock and wait for half an hour while he focussed his mirrors on their wooden ships. Presumably they would have been raping and pillaging around Athens at the time, and having popped back to find their ships burning, Archimedes’ career as a mathematician would have been abruptly cut short.

Banks and what they’re good for

2009-07-20T12:43:00.001+01:00

“Money”, says my daughter. Though a number of investors might think otherwise. “Saving,” she adds, especially as I don’t let her take anything out of her account. It’s building up nicely.

Banks have been around in some form or other for maybe 5,000 years. They probably pre-dated money and were originally a place to store precious items such as grain and agricultural implements.

Modern day banking has become big business and incredibly complex. Most customers avail themselves only of a tiny portion of services provided by banks, such as holding a bank account, and possibly a term deposit.

Like many large businesses, banks have credit ratings that indicate how much confidence a customer can have in the safety of their investment. The lower the rating, the more likely the bank is to lose investors’ money.

The majority of people bank with a financial institution in their own country. Some, however, may have an offshore bank account. This may be to enjoy beneficial rates of interest or to avoid paying taxes in the home country.

The UK has a number of major or ‘high street’ banks, such as Barclays and Lloyds/TSB.

My daughter has decided what banks are good for. Nothing, apparently. So young, so cynical.

Holiday fun

2009-07-13T05:21:00.002+01:00

I did think I'd find time to keep in touch, my dear readers, as I do enjoy sharing my wisdom with you all (hehehe). But seriously, I haven’t been abducted by aliens, nor have I decided to go bush with a swandri and a couple of tin mugs.

I’ve been up to my ears in small children. Quite literally, some days. I wrote 9 weeks ago about disappearing off the radar while I run a two week holiday programme for 5 - 13-year-old children. And we’re back into it. This is week two, all is going wonderfully well but I have very little time for my usual erudite comments.

Normal business shall resume next week, though I will try and offer up one or two useful little article-ettes to keep you amused, informed and unbalanced.

ttfn

Telephones through the ages

2009-07-08T01:55:00.007+01:00

Telephones are part of our way of life, for good or for ill.

They've changed over the years:

There are all sorts of telephones and cordless phones and expandable digital phones like Panasonic KX phones, and peculiar phones…

…and things to do with phones such as recording memos, keeping task lists, getting news, accessing the internet, routing and rerouting calls, call logging and even calling people.

Telephone calls are of course managed by telecoms companies which some people think are sharks…

…but nonetheless, our teenagers would be very different people without them.

And when your phone is too old, it can be used in modern art…

Overcoming fear of failure

2009-07-07T11:48:00.000+01:00

This is maybe something odd to write about, given my usual diet of economic doom and gloom, what’s good in electronics and telecommunications for your business, or the current dire state of the property market, but it’s a matter of some importance, I believe.

Fear of failing can hold people back from achieving their potential. The fear comes from the perceived consequences of failure. But often, it is a misinterpretation of what failing actually means that makes it so unpleasant.

As humans, we are very good a drawing the wrong conclusion. We are princes of misinterpretation, queens of misunderstanding. And at the end of the day, while perception may not be reality, interpretation certainly is, so it’s mostly up to us. If the way we interpret stuff now isn’t helping us, we simply need to change it.

Simply said, but perhaps not simply done. The consequences of failure can be highly unpleasant if we perceive them that way. Particularly scrutiny - public or private. People who are very sensitive to criticism or ridicule, or people who are their own harshest critics, are most susceptible.

But again, perception is within our control. There are a host of self-help sites around, all saying generally quite unhelpful things: ‘it’s not failure, it’s a learning experience,’ ‘understand the benefits of failure,’ ‘put it in perspective.’ Actually, that last one is good advice.

Put it in perspective.

Attribution theory is concerned with how people explain or ‘attribute’ the causes of behaviour, and how the broad categories correlate with how successful or otherwise people feel they are.

People who attribute success to their own long-term (permanent) characteristics, and failure to their own short-term efforts, seem to feel better about themselves than those who ‘disclaim’ their own successes, attributing them to luck, fluke or external factors, and who take possession of their failures, believing them to be indicators of underlying permanent personality characteristics. And also more successful than those who blame others.

So do we just pretend that we are brilliant? That would be empty positive thinking, because at some point, the weight of evidence may put things into perspective. So it may be that it is perspective that we need from the start. A realistic attitude to ourselves, our efforts, our learning. An understanding of being human, being frail but also being strong. Of forgiving our mistakes, of always trying our best.

Cable, satellite, and other television delivery methods

2009-07-07T01:58:00.002+01:00

Most homes in the UK have television these days. But it’s no longer as simple as getting an aerial fitted and plugging in your TV. Quite apart from debates about LCD versus plasma, and what sort of high definition, you need to think about how to get your television signal delivered.

There are many different ways of receiving your television signal. As well as traditional terrestrial television broadcast to aerials (which is becoming less common), there is cable, satellite, and via the internet. Internet is a fairly new phenomenon.

Cable television is delivered via underground coaxial cables to the home. It requires a decoder or cable box, such as Eurovox, and cables may carry telephone, FM radio and broadband internet.

Satellite television is broadcast from communication satellites to a satellite receiver affixed to the home, to a set-top box and thus to the television.

Satellite television in the UK and many other areas of the world tends to be the domain of Sky – in the UK this is British Sky Broadcasting. This is a subscriber service. In recent years, however, an alternative free service known as FTA (free to air), has become available, which requires only purchase of the set-top box, such as the Dreambox.

Other subscriber providers (for satellite or cable) include Virgin Media in the UK, TelstraClear in New Zealand, and Direct TV in the US.

There is plenty of help available at sites such as Satellite help and ezine articles, and many other websites.

Recession tips for the hard up

2009-07-06T11:00:00.001+01:00

Here’s a light-hearted take on the recession. This is someone’s suggestion on how to beat the recession, from comments in a local newspaper. You gotta laugh (don’t ya?).

1. Visit friends around meal times. 5pm is a good time as it’s dinner time and dinner is the most expensive meal of the day. Everyone has at least 5 friends, so that’s five free meals a week.

2. Take your youngest child swimming everyday. Just pay for your child and then you get to use the shower for free. You can even bring some hand washing and do it there.

3. Use the toilets when in the local shopping mall, and bring home all that free toilet paper. Or pretend you’re a cleaner at the food court – lots of free food left on tables just waiting to be stashed in your back pack for lunches and snacks.

4. Set up a fake account on Trade Me, sell your imaginary goods to unsuspecting buyers then, when the cheques arrive, close the account and start again. [editor’s note: this is, of course, breaking the law and not advocated by management, if there is any chance you’ll get caught.]

5. Feed your kids and your self up on Pamol late Friday evening. If you use enough you should wake up about Sunday evening. Imagine all the electricity you save and food you don’t eat. If you wake up about 4pm Sunday you could be at your friends’ by five for dinner.

6. Go to your local department store to watch TV and use their furniture, saving wear and tear on your own goods.

7. Rather than heating your own home, go sit at A & E.

Or go here for something more sensible.

Living in interesting times

2009-07-06T01:30:00.002+01:00

We are living in interesting times, it seems. Former UK Prime Minister John Major certainly thinks so. “We have never seen anything like this, in your lifetime or mine”, he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr in a recent interview.

The prognosis for the economy looks bleak, with governments themselves taking on critical levels of debt. The long-term effects of this can be a loss of credit rating for the country and a fall in exchange rate for the currency, with all the attendant flow-ons.

Nowhere is the precarious nature of economies more evident than in the property market. This is usually an individual’s or a family’s largest investment, and their largest debt. Property blogs are full of bad news, such as owners sitting on mortgages larger than the value of their property, and crippling repayment rates. Evidence is emerging too of some of the shocking practices that went on during the property boom, landing investors in debt that they cannot service now. These practices were perpetrated through greed by investors, but also by lending agencies that were happy to turn a blind eye just to get the mortgage sold.

Many people are wondering just what to do to either keep a roof over their heads, or in some way stave off financial ruin. Those over-stretched who can no longer service their mortgage debts may be looking for a fast house sale. There are companies that will buy houses for cash, and then rent them back to the seller. Of course, this is fraught with difficulty, including the fact that the seller is unlikely to get even market value for their house, and no guarantee that they will be able to rent it for any length of time, at a reasonable rate, or have a chance of buying it back in future.

At present, buying UK property, as in so many other countries, seems a very sensible thing to steer clear of. The key to doing well out of property is to buy and sell at a time that suits you. This time does not suit anyone.

Baby Big Brother

2009-07-03T01:59:00.001+01:00

Language researcher Deb Roy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was more interested in language for the sake of robots, than for understanding how babies develop it. But when he had a baby of his own, and realised that the research on language acquisition only provided snapshots of baby-babbling, Professor Roy decided to turn his home into the Big Brother house.

Roy’s house was fitted with spy cameras that filmed his newborn son for 14 hours a day, every day, for three years. The project, dubbed the Human Speechome Project, gathered 250 gigbytes of data a day. The sheer scale of the enterprise required researchers to invent whole new ways of handling the data to extract meaningful information.

For example, to quickly scan video footage, the team invented an application that showed only movement over time, as a ribbon of colour similar to car lights caught on time elapse film. The accompanying sound was represented by a spectrograph. This enabled analysers to discard periods of inactivity and silence, or periods of activity not including their subject.

But once their target periods were identified, this application did not provide the ability to delve deeper into what was happening. The aim was to transcribe all speech made by and around Roy’s son. However, speech recognition software was too inaccurate to do this, due to the level of background noise in most of the samples. Purely human transcription was too time consuming, with one hour of speech taking 10 hours to transcribe. With 16 months of recording from 14 microphones, the ratio needed to be improved. So the team came up with another tool that found and recorded sound bites, which human transcribers could then use. The combination of automation and human work reduced the ratio of transcription time from 1:10 to 1:2.

The masses of data are still being analysed but Roy says they have identified some interesting findings already. He describes a process called ‘word births’, where it appears adults begin with complex sentences to the child, then subconsciously reduce the complexity until the child understands the word. After this, the adult gradually builds up the complexity once more.

Professor Roy’s research will add valuable insights to the study of human acquisition of language. Already a gene has been identified, which appears to have given us the ability to develop language. Studies have been looking at how the DNA of apes and humans differentiated historically, and identified a gene in humans that provides the ability to move the face in ways that allow for speech.

Other studies have looked at how language is processed, and found marked geographical specialisation within the brain – specific brain areas process specific tasks, such as speech and visual stimulus. One study has put forward a theory that the breakdown of this specialisation results in psychoses, where the brain cannot differentiate speech from within versus externally, for example. So the cost of speech may be mental illness.

While Professor Roy and his small son will no doubt contribute to this burgeoning field of study, his research has had spin-off effects also, such as the potential use of the ‘quick video scan’ software to allow for more efficient analysis of CCTV footage.

He is also working with architects to provide a semi-automated design application to determine the effect of built spaces on human flows. For example, assessing the impact of changes to a retail space on how shoppers will move around it.

And he hasn’t forgotten his first love of robotics. “What if we can build a machine that can step into the shoes of a child and learn in human-like ways,” he asks. “Imagine transferring that into a video game character or into a domestic robot that can now learn to communicate and interact in social ways.”

Robot Wars

2009-07-01T04:49:00.000+01:00

Robot Wars was a US robot competition of the late 1990s that was taken up in the UK and broadcast on BBC2 in the early 2000s. It used to be one of my favourite programmes.

Originally hosted by British television icon, Jeremy Clarkson (well, he is now, but wasn’t really then), his sarcastic style did little to further the fortunes of the show, though it did meet with initial audience approval. In season two, Red Dwarfer Craig Charles took over and he showed much more enthusiasm than Clarkson.

The concept was simple – built a robot that was big, robust and nasty, and destroy all other robots that enter the ring to compete against you. Sort of a mechanical sumo wrestling. The execution was a little more complex, as there were quite a few things that contributed to a winning robot formula.

The robots needed a good balance between offensive and defensive capability. If both robots were left standing at the end of the bout, the judges would vote to choose a winner, based on the robots’ performance. So it wasn’t enough just to survive – you had to look like a winner.

There were hazards in the arena as well – pits that the unwary robot could fall into, gratings where gouts of fire spurted up unexpectedly, and the house robots, restricted to marked zones but beware if your robot strayed. The house robots were twice as big as the combatant bots, and could easily dismantle the unwary.

In the second or third series a new robot came onto the scene that blitzed its opponents. It was a little like the Viv Richards of robot wars – in its heyday so far ahead of its peers that none could touch it. It was called Chaos 2, and won the overall title two years in a row, the only robot to do so.

Its characteristics defined the key elements to creating a successful combatant robot.

1. It was tough. Its rounded profile made it hard to land blows on, and its outer shell repelled all but the heaviest of implements.

2. It had a low centre of gravity and was difficult to flip.

3. It was self-righting. If flipped over, it could flip itself back again and keep fighting.

4. It was agile and highly manoeuvrable. Many robots lost when they couldn’t catch their opponents, or get away from them.

5. It had a good controller. Robot inventor and controller George Francis was a whizz with the joystick. Very seldom was he fazed by the opposition, or even the house robots.

6. It had the most powerful flipper of its type in all of robot wars. Its winning weapon, a front-end flipper, was able to flip some opponents clear out of the arena. No mean feat when you consider the combatant robots weighed in the vicinity of 70-80kg.

I’m not really a geek.

Managing your finances

2009-06-30T13:26:00.000+01:00

OK, to get us out of the recession we’re supposed to go and spend up large. To stimulate the economy etc etc. Yeah, right. I’m not going to blow my money when I don’t actually have a full-time job, nor am I getting paid anywhere near what I used to. I’m doing what I should have started doing years ago – I’m managing my money.

To begin, I consulted finance brokers. An advisor was able to arrange a number of things I wanted put in place, like income protection insurance and a pension. And probably most useful, he helped me to set up a budget and track my income and expenditure.

He provided me with a template that helped me understand the major components of my finances. From this, I developed my own spreadsheet-based budgeting system, but there are plenty of ready-made applications available. It let me see what I actually spent, allowed me to set realistic limits, and then it provided me a way to keep track of what I spent. That way, I could stop spending when I reached my limit.

I also restructured my bank accounts into on call savings accounts and current accounts. I wanted a way to see clearly what money I had, for different purposes. I kept one savings account for tax money (I’m self employed), and one for my personal savings. That way I wouldn’t unintentionally spend my tax money on special things.

And I keep two current accounts – one for direct debits and automatic payments, to which I transfer just enough to pay everything off each month, and the other with a small overdraft which I keep at just over or under zero dollars. The small amount of overdraft interest is the cost of the convenience of not having to move money in and out of my savings accounts excessively. This lets me keep enough in the savings account to enjoy a higher rate of interest.

And finally, I try to take advantage of best rate savings accounts for the bulk of my savings, such as the account where the interest rate is higher than the on call accounts, but drops to nearly nothing if you make a withdrawal.

Each month, I pay off my credit card in full. I’m not at all interested in paying the ludicrously high interest rate that credit cards charge. The only reason I use a credit card is that I get a 1% rebate on my turnover, in the form of credit once a year. It pays the annual fee and gives me another couple of hundred dollars. Money for nothing, so I’ll take it. My approach to the card is that, if I can’t afford to buy something without using the credit card, I certainly can’t afford it with the card.

For this reason I also use loyalty cards. But I don’t let the card drive my spending. Even though I was able to procure a rice cooker, a milkshake maker and an electric whisk through one loyalty scheme, when I looked at what I was spending at the supermarket where I earned my points, I discovered it is so expensive that, by switching supermarkets, I saved enough to buy all those things within about three months.

Mollycoddled kids

2009-06-29T12:20:00.001+01:00

What are the consequences of over-protectiveness for those over-protected? New Zealand is still a society that allows its children to face risks and take responsibility, but even our frontier, can-do approach is coming under fire.

Take the story of a family who are being investigated by Child, Youth and Family (CYFs) because they allowed their 9-year-old son and his 4-year-old sister to play unsupervised in the local school playground. Their father wanted to provide his children with the freedom and responsibility he enjoyed as a child.

Family services have an unenviable job of finding a balance between protecting children from family violence, and not interfering with the way in which parents choose to bring up their children. New Zealand has removed the defence of ‘reasonable force’ from legislation related to assault on a child, and is about to vote in a citizens’ referendum on whether smacking should be a criminal offense. Obviously the difficulty in allowing any physical assault on children is that it then becomes a matter of interpretation for the courts. In the current situation, the interpretation is the responsibility of the police.

Should a 9-year-old be able to walk to the local playground and play there unsupervised, for up to two hours? That depends so very much on the child, the family, and the environment. Two hours is a long time, and a child could easily be taken in that time, and disappear without trace. But how likely is abduction, and how well can children keep themselves safe without adult supervision? And at what age?

There is real concern that our generation of parents is bringing up a generation of children that are a) extremely self-centred, b) fearful and litigious, and c) lacking in life skills to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. When is the right time for children to learn to take care of themselves? Are we going to be still supervising our adult children, as many of them remain at home during their years of tertiary study?

There is another side effect not listed above. The fourth consequence is that we may be bringing up children that are d) severely lacking in self confidence, in terms of their ability to manage their own lives. More and more parents are fighting back against this wave of mollycoddling, in the US and the UK, with websites such as Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy advocating that parents reclaim independence for their children. Yet how many of these parents who try to provide opportunities for their kids to learn to fend for themselves will get abused by other, more risk-averse parents and questioned by increasingly controlling government agencies.

The Philippines

2009-06-26T07:11:00.001+01:00

The Philippines is an archipelago of over 7,000 islands in south east Asia. It is the 12th most populous country in the world, with approximately 90 million people, in a land area roughly 300,000 square kilometres. This compares with the UK, with a population of around 70 million, and land area of about 240,000 square kilometres. It has a tropical climate, lush vegetation and many, many beautiful beaches.

The capital city is Manila, located on the eastern shores of Manila Bay. Its lovely location facing west over Manila Bay provides the opportunity for splendid sunsets on warm tropical evenings. Manila is a fascinating city with a long history, many historical buildings still in good condition, and a thriving economy.

Cebu, to the south, is one of the Philippines’ most developed provinces, with Cebu City being one of the main centres of trade, commerce, education and industry in the southern islands of the Visayas. Mactan Island is a tiny, rectangular coral island that looks like it’s been chipped off the larger landmass of Cebu. It enjoys a reputation for its crystal clear water, sandy beaches and as a notable scuba diving location. The tiny island is the place where Spanish explorer Ferdinand Magellan met his end.

The property market in the Philippines appears to be similarly affected by the global recession, with opportunities for investors as prices fall. As a holiday destination, the Philippines is probably more attractive than some other Asian countries which are beset by political turmoil. The country as a whole is also generally well developed.

There are many sites where you can check out property for sale in the Philippines, either to live permanently, or just to occupy for those mid-winter holidays in the sun and rent for the rest of the year. It’s no coincidence that the best time of the year is January and February.

The two locations mentioned above are worthy of further investigation, but the country is large and diverse, and there are many populated areas. Check out travel blogs to keep abreast of what is going on in the market in general.

Michael Jackson

2009-06-26T01:22:00.001+01:00

Love him or hate him, he certainly made his mark on the music world. In an industry famous for strange people, he was one of the strangest. And suddenly, at the age of 50, following a cardiac arrest, Michael Jackson has died.

Born in 1958, Jackson was part of a musically talented family and hit the world stage with four of his brothers in the Jackson Five. He was just 11. Throughout the next two decades, first with the Jackson Five and then as a solo artist, Jackson turned the musical world on its head. He became one of the first African American crossover stars through exposure on MTV, elevated the music video to an art form and promotional tool, and wielded a huge influence on later musical genres such as hip hop.

He also donated millions of dollars to charity through his music, his Heal the World Foundation, and his direct support. But towards the end of his hey day controversy dogged him, particularly with his tragic forays into cosmetic surgery, his quest for fatherhood, and accusations of paedophilia against him bringing him most publicity. He is a psychological case-study.

Through all this, however, his music has remained popular and he was recognised in the Guinness World Records as the most successful entertainer of all time.

Jackson was in Los Angeles preparing for a series of 50 concerts in London to mark his great comeback. Plans were to follow this up with a final world tour. He was found collapsed in the hall of his rented apartment and could not be revived by paramedics.

So ends a brilliant career.

The Story of Rough Trade

2009-06-25T13:09:00.001+01:00

In 1976, in a street just off Ladbrooke Grove, amidst an IRA bombing campaign and at a time when Maggie Thatcher was getting noticed in politics, a Cambridge graduate called Geoff Travis opened a record shop. This was the beginning of Rough Trade.

Geoff Travis had the good fortune of being in the right kind of person, in the right place, at the right time. Music in the 1970s was in the grip of the big corporates, and putting out your own record was unheard of. But when punk rock hit the music scene, and Manchester punkers The Buzzcocks put out the single Spiral Scratch themselves, Rough Trade stocked it. And sold it, in the hundreds. Suddenly, Rough Trade was the place to go for an alternative to the middle-of-the-road stuff sold by the big labels.

But more than this, the records sold through Rough Trade proved that anyone could put out a record. A band called the Desperate Bicycles printed instructions for how to do just that on their record sleeve. Another, Scritti Politti, did the same and people realised that it could be done. The tight monopoly of the giant record companies was being ever so slightly loosened. Do-It-Yourself had come to the record industry.

Distribution was still an issue, however, and other independent labels like Virgin and Island Records had to rely on the big companies for retail outlets. Though the bands themselves were able to press their own records, and Rough Trade provided the distribution, a single shop in London was not going to change the record industry world.

And then along came Richard Scott, and the world did change.

Click here for the 90 minute video of the Story of Rough Trade.

Business phones

2009-06-25T00:52:00.001+01:00

If you are setting up a small business, you will need to think about a phone system, so that customers can contact you. This would include telephones for making and receiving calls, and phone lines for voice and data (ie internet).

The type of line may be a traditional line for voice calls, and a separate line for data, or you may consider an approach such as using VoIP (Voice over IP, basically voice calls converted to data and sent via the internet). If so, for data you might think about using symmetric digital subscriber line (SDSL), which has the same upload as download capacity, rather than the traditional asymmetric line (ADSL).

In terms of a system within your office, what suits you best will depend on how many people you have or how many handsets you need. For larger installations, a PBX is probably most suitable, for a few users, a key system would suffice. For a very few users (up to five, perhaps), a KSU-less system (where capability is within each phone, rather than in a central unit) could be enough. A VoIP system would work without handsets, so this is another approach.

There are many vendors that can advise you or can provide you with systems. You may wish to just go ahead and, for example, buy BT Synergy business phones, a well respected vendor and a sophisticated type of phone. However, given the different options available, a little research and good advice may prevent you from making an inappropriate selection. Niche consultancies such as Brite Telecom can not only source a phone system for you, they can help you decide what you need and present you with options for a solution.

Cordless phones

2009-06-24T11:52:00.001+01:00

Are you tired of being tied to your old phone, stuck to the wall of kitchen with a metre long curly cable that’s forever tying itself in knots and is really only about 10cm long and tying up your freedom?

Well, it’s time you upgraded to a cordless phone. Mobile technology has come into the home with the new, no curly cords handsets that you can wander about your home with. Imagine being able to sit in the comfort of your lounge and chat to your friends. Or lie beside the pool on a hot summer’s day and pay your respects to the mother-in-law. And if you are caught short and need to pay a visit, take the phone with you, so there is no need to miss that important call.

Best of all, you can have many handsets. Now there can be a phone in every room. You will never need to run to catch a call. Why not buy Panasonic cordless phones for your home? They are robust, stylish and have good range. You can pick them up from Highland Telecom, your Highland provider.

National Anthems

2009-06-23T22:43:00.004+01:00

Should the All Blacks sing the national anthem?

I noticed in the 2nd test France vs the All Blacks, how the French sang their national anthem with vigour and feeling. Then I noticed how the All Blacks did not. At least, most of them.

One or two players did sing with sincerity, some seemed to attempt to mumble something, but the majority were closed-mouthed and stoic.

I think it’s a shame that they don’t sing. Whatever the reason, and there may be good ones for it, it’s a poor reflection on them as representatives of their country. Professionalism is all very well, but playing for New Zealand should never be just a day job.

~

Best and worst national anthems

After spending several gruelling minutes listening to various anthems, here are my picks for best and worst (BTW, if YouTube is being a pig and not loading my links, you'll have to go search, sorry):

Best

1. Russia – extremely rumpty tumpty music, though a tad long.

2. South Africa – close run thing with Russia, still gives me goosebumps, knowing the history, but Die Stem reminds me too much of the Aussie anthem.

3. French – of course, theirs had to be immortalised in one of the best movies of all time.

Worst

1. Greece – wake me when it’s over (all 128 verses of it).

2. Australian – their land is dirt by sea

3. Italy – maybe not the worst, but perhaps the silliest, the start sounds like it’s from the Nutcracker Suite and then it gets all Verdi.

Mobile TV

2009-06-23T09:47:00.001+01:00

Mobile TV subscriber numbers are expected to reach nearly half a billion by 2013, according to analysts at Cantab Wireless. The majority of watchers will be in Asia, with Europe and North America catching on from 2010.

But an industry expert, Weijie Yun, president of Telegent Systems, believes mobile TV providers will need to offer free subscriptions to win customers.

Major companies are working to provide solutions for popular smart phones to increase the mobile TV customer base. Envivio has announced a solution for Apple’s iphone.

Mobile television is TV delivered to your mobile phone. It seems to be most popular in Asia, particularly in Korea, Japan and China. It has had false starts in the UK and Germany, being abandoned a short while after launch.

To catch on, TV capability will have to be available in most standard smart phones. When it is, just get cash for your mobile and upgrade.

I want to be an Onion writer

2009-06-22T11:25:00.002+01:00

I want to write for The Onion. The Onion is way cool. Who wants to read boring news? It’s all bad anyway, so you may as well make it funny.

The Onion is a US spoof online news site. It has television news-like video, audio clips, sports, politics and local news, entertainment, science and technology. It has a link to a Google maps-like world with points of interest, entitled ‘Our Dumb World’. I love the entry for Adelaide, Australia – Bar brawl breaking out over who has the best beer ad. So typical!

Even the ads are spoofs. Like the ad for the Onion Personals – “Find someone too good for you” – with a suspiciously Twitter-looking background. Or the ad for the Onion Mobile, which just got smaller and more difficult to read (the mobile, I’m guessing, not the ad).

Favourite story: Middle-aged centre provides safe, positive place for fortysomethings to go after work. It even talks about ‘latchkey adults’, those who work an eight-hour day and then have to go home to an empty house. Tell me about it!

There’s also the related site The A.V. Club, dedicated to the entertainment world and containing film reviews and the latest celeb gossip. Oh, it’s all too much.

If the US carries on this way, they’ll soon invent something as contemporary as Not The Nine O’Clock News.

Wow.

Smarty-pants phones

2009-06-19T23:17:00.000+01:00

Do you wish you had one of the new-fangled super clever phones? But don’t want to abandon the multi-hundred pound investment you made just a couple of years ago?

Help is at hand. Now you can get cash for your old mobile phone. If you want to be a mobile phone buyer, and a mobile phone haver, not a mobile phone wannabe, find one of those places that gives you money for your existing phone. The better your old phone, the more moolah you get.

BTW, what happens to old mobile phones? The vast majority apparently sit in old wardrobes and mutate into alien life-forms that will take over the planet in 2106. But that’s of no concern now. Phones sold to recyclers will be either flogged off to poorer or backward parts of the world (Africa, South America, Watford), broken down for parts or, if it’s a high value phone, sold on eBay. If you do have a pretty flash phone you’d like to get rid of, maybe check out the eBay option yourself. But for run-of-the-mill middle-aged phones, recyclers are a pretty good option.

Sweet. Now you can go out and get one of those smart phones. Wikipedia tells us that a ‘smart phone’ has ‘advanced capability’, with ‘PC-like functionality.’ Wikipedia is very helpful. In 28 different languages. Though not always accurate. Like, it says my continued donations keep Wikipedia running! Which they don’t.

So, what can you do with a smart phone? You can work for a month just using a smartphone – you can view most office documents. You can burn calories – ‘Walk ‘N’ Play’ is available from Apple’s ‘App Store’. You may never need another personal computer. You can become a smarter and better student – heck, you can even make calls!

And best of all, a smart phone is the socially acceptable way to signal that you are bored with the person talking to you. No more standing there with your hands in your pockets while some bore talks on and on interminably. Just whip out the blackberry and your message will get through. If it’s good enough for the New York State Senate majority leader, then it’s good enough for you.

The Worst of the Worst Movies

2009-06-19T07:04:00.003+01:00

Courtesy of Rotten Tomatoes

Number 5: King’s Ransom (2005)

Critical consensus: An utterly inept, would-be comedy.

Starring: Anthony Anderson, Jay Mohr, Regina Hall, Loretta Devine

Synposis: Successful but boorish business man Malcolm King and his mistress plan his own kidnap after his wife threatens a costly divorce. He will be ransomed for a substantial part of his fortune, which will be kicked back to him. Unfortunately, he gravely underestimates the ineptitude of his kidnappers.

Comments: “The wordplay of the title here is the only slightly clever element of this extremely lame comedy.” “King’s Ransom deserves to be bashed, burned, and have its ashes scattered over Hollywood.” “Spurn King's Ransom as you would spurn a rabid weasel.”

Tomatometer: 0%

Number 4: Pinocchio (2002)

Critical consensus: Torturous: Avoid it like the plague.

Starring: Roberto Benigni, Carlo Guiffre, Nicoletta Braschi, Breckin Meyer

Synopsis: Well, you know the story.

Comments: “Benigni presents himself as the boy puppet Pinocchio, complete with receding hairline, weathered countenance and American Breckin Meyer's ridiculously inappropriate Valley Boy voice.” “If you saw Benigni's Pinocchio at a public park, you'd grab your kids and run and then probably call the police.” “This is a monumental achievement in practically every facet of inept filmmaking: joyless, idiotic, annoying, heavy-handed, visually atrocious, and often downright creepy.”

Tomatometer: 0%

Number 3: Crossover (2006)

Critical consensus: This heartfelt but incompetent picture is the cinematic equivalent of an airball.

Starring: Anthony Mackie, Wesley Jonathan, Allen Payne, Lil JJ

Synopsis: A story about street basketball – a tale of two friends from Very Different Backgrounds who discover, through streetball, that they…well, we wouldn't want to spoil it for you; suffice it to say that copious amounts of Wayne Brady are crucial to the plot. Draw your own conclusions.

Comments: “A real air ball, so poorly scripted that most of the major plot developments occur offscreen.” “Much as they would like it to, basketball can't save the youthful inner-city players here. Nor does the ultra-fast-paced street version of the sport save this movie from predictability and tedium.” “I hated this movie. It’s a piece of junk.”

Tomatometer: 0%

Number 2: Alone in the Dark (2005)

Critical consensus: Stylish, but inept on almost every level.

Starring: Christian Slater, Tara Reid, Stephen Dorff, William Sanderson

Synposis: A paranormal investigator faces the toughest case of his life – rooted in his own dark past. All sorts of stuff about some kind of supernatural evil. Too involved to be worth the effort of reproducing here.

Comments: “Lame monster movies like this adaptation of the popular Atari video game are scary for all the wrong reasons.” “Little of Alone in the Dark makes Earthly sense, but it at least knows how to be bad in original ways.” “This is pretty close to one of the worse movies that I've ever seen and having to recap it is making my brain bleed.”

Tomatometer: 1%

Number 1: Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever (2002)

Critical consensus: Wall-to-wall action without a hint of wit or plot.

Starring: Lucy Liu, Antonio Banderas, Gregg Henry, Ray Park

Synopsis: Lucy Liu and Antonio Banderas are opposing super-deadly secret agents who team up to take down the corrupt head of their agency in order to save a young boy who has been injected with a deadly weapon/virus thing.

Comments: “Banderas mopes through this hideous and unintelligible enterprise like a bloodhound with a hangover, while Liu elects to look cool in leather in lieu of a performance.” “Antonio Banderas, Lucy Liu, have you no pride? Have you no standards? Have you no shame? Don't you pay attention to what's written on the papers you're signing?” “Sadistic: Gratuitous Vs. Arbitrary.”

Tomatometer: 0%

ADSL vs SDLS vs leased line

2009-06-18T06:57:00.001+01:00

Wondering what sort of options there are for sending and receiving data? It depends on what your requirements are.

The cheapest option is ADSL, or asymmetric digital subscriber line. This has a decent download capacity, but very small upstream capacity. This is useful for residential users who like to browse the internet but don’t need to send much data.

The next cheapest option is SDSL, which is symmetric digital subscriber line. As the name suggests, the upload and download capacity are the same. Not as great a download capacity as ADSL, but significantly greater upload. This is more expensive than ADSL, but is more suitable for small to medium-sized businesses.

If the capacity of ADSL or SDSL isn’t enough, the next option is leased lines. They are significantly more expensive, but sometimes the cost-benefit analysis shows that this is the best option.

Leased lines are symmetric (ie same upload and download capacity) fixed lines connecting two locations. They don’t have telephone numbers as each end of the line is permanently connected. They carry telephone, data or internet services. Leased lines are known as ‘Private Circuit’ or ‘Data Line’ in the UK. An example is BT’s kilostream or megastream.

The market is reasonably competitive, with many leased line, ADSL and SDSL providers reducing costs.

Is a smack part of good parenting?

2009-06-17T13:07:00.001+01:00

New Zealand will be holding a citizens’ initiated referendum in six weeks or so. The referendum question is: “Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?”

The question is causing considerable consternation amongst politicians, including leaders of the two major parties, John Key (Prime Minister) and Phil Goff, both of whom have said they won’t be voting in the referendum. Architect of the so-called anti-smacking legislation and Greens Party MP Sue Bradford has stated that she finds this attitude disappointing and that the leaders should be setting a good example, but I can understand their reluctance.

The referendum was registered during the progress of the bill and the wording was written without a clear knowledge of what the final legislation would say. It was passed by the Clerk of the House. The bill was passed into law in 2007 with support of the Government and the major opposition (which is now the Government).

The premise that smacking is part of good parenting is not a given, therefore the wording makes an inconclusive assumption. If people answer “yes”, they could be seen to be undermining the process of good parental correction. If they vote “no”, they are supporting the use of smacking. It’s akin to that classic question, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?”

Opponents of the anti-smacking legislation, including ACT MP Rodney Hyde, say the wording is perfectly clear. However, compare these questions, which use the same form: “Should assault as part of good discipline of a spouse be a criminal offence?”; “Should assault as part of good workplace discipline be a criminal offence?” Because smacking another adult is called assault.

Why should children be the only members of society who are not protected by the law from physical violence? There is zero tolerance of physical violence between adults – it’s not legal to thump someone who you believe is behaving inappropriately. Certainly, the police do exercise discretion and it’s up to the parties involved or witnessing as to whether it even becomes a legal matter, but why should the same not apply to children? The law as written in New Zealand allows police discretion not to prosecute where the violence is considered of a trivial nature.

Some studies have concluded that smacking is ineffective as a form of discipline, and may lead to the belief that violence is a way of solving problems. However, many people hold fast to the view that poor parental discipline is the cause of many youth-related social problems, and that including smacking in parental discipline is the solution. This does not address the fact that much poor parenting is in fact due to a lack of skill and knowledge, and a lack of respect for partners and children. Thumping people doesn’t contribute greatly to improving those aspects. A survey carried out by Save the Children in the UK has some telling insights into how children themselves view smacking.

Our society is becoming increasingly violence-averse. Known as Political Correctness, this movement encompasses not only physical violence, but verbal also. Seen by many as overly liberal, the movement is beginning to settle into the Western psyche and even be reflected at the highest levels of international relations. The moderate views and conciliatory approaches of the Obama regime being a current example. Hopefully soon the groundswell of attitude will gain sufficient critical mass to ensure that striking children is no more acceptable than striking adults.

Don't scrimp on home insurance

2009-06-17T03:15:00.000+01:00

A 22% increase in people not renewing or cancelling home insurance has insurance brokers worried.

Graeme Trudgill, corporate affairs executive at the British Insurance Brokers Association (BIBA), said people should not scrimp on home insurance to try and save money. “Of all the insurances that you do choose, the household ones and the motor ones are an absolute must, so we really do recommend that you buy them,” Trudgill said.

Home insurance covers more or less all a person’s worldly possessions, and risking this sort of loss to save a typical monthly premium of £12 is a false economy.

In the ever-increasing competition for the individual pound that people are experiencing during the current economic climate, many have chosen to forego insuring their house and contents, trusting that they will not suffer burglary, fire or floods. However, this may be short-term thinking, as the consequences of such a loss if not insured may be so severe that they cannot be recovered from.

It may be argued that the combination of economic conditions and climatic change may make the need for home insurance even greater, particularly against theft and flooding.

This is passion

2009-06-16T14:18:00.000+01:00

What is passion? The hots for a sexy chick or hunk? A flaming desire for the latest stereo gear? Simply an emotional state, and an unstable and undesirable one at that?

Ask the Irish about passion. Sunday, bloody Sunday, the Falls Road, generations of strife about a difference of belief. Ask the French when it comes to food and love (in that order). And ask the Brazilians about carnival. And Iron Maiden.

A wonderful video of the crowd taken at a 2008 concert in Brazil defines passion for me. The subject is a man called Bruno, and his face shows the full depth of feeling that is awash following any extreme experience. This time, it is an Iron Maiden performance. The iconic British metal band spent most of 2008 and early 2009 on a massive world tour of more than 25 countries, playing over 80 concerts.

Iron Maiden were at their heyday throughout the 1980s, more than 20 years ago. But the interesting thing about the world tour is that they played to a whole new generation of fans. The first stop was Mumbai, and young Indians flocked to see the classic rockers. The same was repeated in Central and South America – youngsters in groups, plus the older generation of original fans, and even whole families, swearing away in appropriate Maiden manner.

And there was Bruno, captured at the end of the March 4th 2008 concert in Curatiba, Brazil, clutching the drumstick he had presumably caught, tears coursing down his cheeks. His final gesture, thanking the Lord, confirmed what I thought – the passion was upon him.

Who doesn't have a mobile phone

2009-06-16T04:05:00.001+01:00

In this day and age I find it almost impossible to believe anyone doesn’t have a mobile phone. In the West, of course, I’m not including all those poor people who don’t have clean water to drink. Got to get your priorities right – food, water, shelter, arms first, then mobile phones and laptops.

After my separation, my mother gave me her mobile phone. She couldn’t figure out how to use it. My ex- kept our mobile, and I was happy to let him have it, given what he’d used it for. So I got my mum’s phone. I discovered it only texted in upper case. I spent the next six months shouting at people. I COULDN’T HELP IT, could I? It was no wonder my poor old mum, who is not bad technologically, given her age, couldn’t work it out. I couldn’t work it out, and I’d had mobiles for about 10 years then. The menu system had been invented by a logically-challenged. I purloined some of the cash the ex- and I still had in the joint home loan account and bought myself a nice $500 Nokia. Happy, I was.

My mum’s got a new phone, one that’s easier to use, I guess. She texts me sometimes, with cryptic messages such as ‘I’ll be over shortly’ and ‘Did you get the velvet?’ Somewhat concerning as she lives seven hours drive away. The messages are actually for her sister but come to me by mistake. Still, it’s nice to hear from her, even if she doesn’t mean to be talking to me.

But there is someone I know who doesn’t have a mobile phone. My partner! It’s not that he’s technologically challenged – he’s a damned programmer and now a development manager, keeps all my PCs running, has set up a home network with router and all sorts of other wondrous things that I have to ask him to fix if they break down as I have no idea of what they are or do. But he refuses to have a mobile. It drives me crazy. I think he just doesn’t like being available. I bought him an answerphone for his birthday last year, because I got fed up with not being able to contact him. When he was still on dial-up I had to email him if I needed to talk to him.

He hasn’t switched the answerphone on yet. It’s been a year. Grrr.

I’ve become his personal answer service. His sister regularly texts me to see if I know where he is. His netball coach rings me so I can pass on messages. Even his mother texts me. Yes, his mother has a mobile. Come to think of it, his father doesn’t. Hmm, some hereditary pattern there?

My man says he doesn’t want to get into the consumer cycle of mobile phone upgrading. As if he would. His desktop PC is 10 years old and is running Windows 98. His laptop is eight. He’s only just returned the non-cordless landline phone he’s been renting off Telecom for 7 years (since he got his wonderful answerphone). He could have bought a mobile phone with what he’s paid for that ($7 month).

But he reckons if he starts, he’d be upgrading every six months and the flat would be littered with old mobiles. I point out that I’ll sell my mobile before I upgrade, that would be a good thing to do, but he doesn’t listen.

If you don’t have a mobile phone, you’re a parasite on all your friends and family. There are some good mobile phone reviews around to help you decide what to get. Take pity on your partner or significant others and stay in touch. You never know when someone might desperately need to get hold of you. And how on earth are you going to update yourself on Twitter if you’re stuck in a traffic jam on the way to work?

Toothpaste cure for pimples

2009-06-15T13:22:00.000+01:00

My daughter, who is approaching those years when the mildest expression of hormonal changes is facial pimples, informs me that toothpaste is a treatment for said zits.

I was, naturally, amazed. Mostly that she knew something that I didn’t. But also that here is a treatment that is a whole lot cheaper than those prepared remedies. I was getting ready to try surgical alcohol on her pre-pubescent pustulous eructations or, failing that, some of the flagon of sherry from the local booze barn. So that will save a dollar or two.

There is some dissention as to whether toothpaste actually does work, though upon reading it carefully, the conclusion is that, yes it does. The problem is that it may work too well on some skin types, burning off not only the pimple but also the surrounding skin, leaving a burn mark or scab. Not cool.

Apparently, the menthol or alcohol (check the ingredient list) is the active ingredient that does the work. The less other stuff in there, the better (less to irritate the skin). The active ingredient burns off the pimple, which is usually covered in thinner skin, opening it up and drawing out the impurity. The danger is when it burns off the surrounding skin as well, so it’s important to find a toothpaste (or whatever remedy) that won’t damage the skin.

I hadn’t realised that toothpaste has alcohol in it. I shall forthwith additionally begin to brush my teeth after every meal, snack, when I get up in the morning, after speaking on the telephone, after drinking, and definitely after kissing. Hmm. Perhaps instead of kissing.

About SDSL

2009-06-15T01:47:00.002+01:00

Interest has been rekindled in Symmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (SDSL) connections. It’s a legitimate halfway house between ADSL (suitable for residential use), and frame-relay or leased line connections (which ship large amounts of data very fast, but cost very large sums of money). SDSL internet connections do cost more than ADSL, but for some small to medium sized businesses, the average 256Kbps upload speed of the latter is just not enough.

So, if you’re interested in SDSL, here are some things you need to know about it.

SDSL is very stable.
It’s available in many parts of Europe, North America and Asia.
SDSL utlises the twisted pair copper wires used for telephone landline service. However, SDSL cannot share lines with voice data.
SDSL requires a specialised modem.
The closer you are to a telephone exchange, the faster your connection will be.
The main difference between SDSL and its predecessor ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) is that the upload capacity of SDSL is the same as the download capacity, whereas with ADSL, the upload capacity is quite small (25% or less of download).
ADSL has a higher maximum download capacity than SDSL (theoretically up to 9Mbps) but smaller maximum upload (up to 640Kbps). SDSL works in the range of 1-3Mbps.
SDSL uses lower contention ratios, up to a maximum of 10:1 (ie you will share your line with only up to 9 other users), whereas ADSL ratios are up to 20:1.
A number of emerging technologies require very fast upload as well as download of files, such as VoIP, video conferencing, SOA web services, advanced gaming, VPN and live webcasting.
VoIP (voice over IP) will experience sound issues with too narrow an upload capacity. VoIP (also known as web phone or Internet phone) is emerging as an alternative to fixed line and mobile telephony.
Video conferencing requires large data up- and download capacity to stream real-time video images and sound. If there is upload delay, video images will become choppy.
For a limited audience, SDSL can provide sufficient bandwidth for live webcasting. However, this is a specialised application and to get reliable streaming to a wide audience requires specialised servers, so is probably best handled by web hosting companies.
SDSL is sufficient for limited forms of website hosting. However, if your website is mission critical, it is probably safer to use a web hosting company that will have a dedicated line connection.
Web services or Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) can work well using SDSL to connect, and standardised communication methods such as XML to carry data.
Virtual Private Networks (VPN) also operate well using SDSL, as more people elect to work from home. SDSL is certainly cheaper than other high capacity upload options.
There are other types of Digital Subscriber Line available – HDSL (High bit-rate SDL), RADSL (rate-adaptive SDL), VDSL (very high-speed DSL).

You can find more information about SDSL on various broadband news sites.

Blogs no-one reads

2009-06-13T01:03:00.001+01:00

Web logs. Blogs. The new revolution in self-publishing. “Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging…” Yay for Google. And Google provides a search engine which they say searches all blogs, not just theirs. But my search for some blogs I know about, on a number of different sites, only came up with Blogspot. Oh well.

Why have so many of the blogs out there fallen into disuse? Something like only 5% of blogs seem to be regularly updated.

When I began blogging, the medium was foreign to me and to be honest, I still don’t really understand all the intricacies of site feeds etc. The biggest hindrance I saw was in getting people to find my writing. When you publish in the print media, there are a number of possible methods. Books, newspapers, magazines, to name a few. Each has an established broadcast channel. Books are probably trickiest, as they need to be promoted individually. Newspapers and magazines may already have established readerships or, if new, will hopefully have a plan for creating a circulation.

But writing a paragraph or two daily onto a page hosted in some domain somewhere in the world, seems to me a bit like writing something on a scrap of paper and throwing it outside my front door. Who is ever going to find it?

The New York Post published an interesting article on this very topic. The article cited a number of reasons why blogs die off, one being that revealing your personal life on a public forum can attract some undesireable attention. But the other was an expectation that the world would hang on your every word, you could quit your day job and just write to your heart’s content. Which didn’t happen.

So is it just a dream? Or a crock of s*it? The beauty of the Internet, and the trouble with it, is that it’s so accessible that everyone’s on there. At least 130 million blogs, around 7 or 8 million regularly updated, and only about half a million with a regular readership. That’s worse odds than owning a winning racehorse (and I should know).

Overseas property

2009-06-12T05:50:00.001+01:00

If you’re in the market, you might be thinking about an overseas investment property, investing in property in other countries, where houses are good value. But there may be some serious catches to watch out for. Here are some things to think about.

Visit the country where you want to buy. This gives you a feel for the place.
Don’t get sucked in by television programmes that show awesome houses at cheap prices. The programmes often get their expenses paid by agents and are an opportunity for agents to tempt overseas buyers.
Use Internet sites to browse, don’t worry about glossy brochures.
Understand what you want. Are you buying to rent, or for you to live?
Have a budget in mind. Do your homework first and understand what the market is offering, be realistic about what you can afford, and remember to include all those extra costs, such as sales tax, commission, legal and processing fees, and contingency money. And you may have to buy furniture, perhaps a kitchen or bathroom, and you may need to renovate.
Don’t be hurried into a decision with the threat of “another interested buyer”. Take the ‘c’est la vie’ attitude – if it is meant to be, it will be.
Do not sign anything unless it’s been reliably translated (or you are fluent in the local language). You can even go home without signing, and can sign at the embassy or at a recognised lawyer/notary.
Make sure you use a reputable agent. Check with the local chamber of commerce or embassy or, if it exists, a national professional association.
Large offices, busy staff and flash service don’t always add up to better.
Watch out for brainwashing, where an agent might show you up to 20 properties a day, starting and ending with a couple of nice ones, with a whole lot of mediocre properties in the middle.
There are plenty of properties to be had. Take your time.
Think about, and find out about, other factors that may effect your investment, such as political stability (of the country itself and of its neighbours), socio-economic stability (ethnic strife, corruption), geographical and climatic issues (earthquakes, floods, drought etc), and accessibility (how easy is it to reach your destination, will anyone make the effort).

Once all these factors have been taken into account, if buying overseas is still attractive, there are a number of good overseas property guides.