Kitchen Paper Plan

The next weekend, Placemakers had a kitchen expo on so we went down and had a look at what they had on offer and had one of the lovely ladies put our plan into their CAD Drawing program to mock up what the kitchen would look like from a bunch of different profiles. With a couple of small changes, adjustments and measurements, the dishwasher was able to fit closer to the sink without causing the hob and oven to be too far from everything else.

At this stage, we’re waiting on pricing for what we’ve designed so far, if the window renovation will cost too much or if it’ll be too hard to make the outside of the house look ok with the smaller window, we may have to revisit that approach and do without the large pantry.

Nimbus

Tobi

The two of them can’t stand being separated for too long, vet trips are taken in pairs so that they don’t spend the entire day looking for each other and they often snuggle up together on a bed or couch.

I’m glad they’ve both got over their obsession with needing to climb inappropriate things like the television and the net blinds, now they generally only climb onto laps, beds and couches, with the very occasional kitchen bench leap.

Tobi eating Cobwebs

Nimbus in the Sun

Screen-shot of the new design for Aimee's Website

I never got around to fixing it in Internet Explorer, I don’t imagine it works correctly, for one, I didn’t put in the IE PNG Fix, and I definitely used 24-bit transparent PNGs in there. However, it works in Safari, Firefox and Opera and that seems to be all the Aimee cares about so that is that for now, maybe some fixes another day.

I put it live this afternoon, it could definitely use a few tweaks and finishing touches but I think I’m happy with how it came out.

Aimee is planning on moving around the structure of her site, which is using WordPress. In that respect the navigation isn’t particularly useful at the moment and the front page is going to be a static page rather than her blog.

Also, I got bored near the end and put a weird little Easter egg into the theme, try double-clicking the wings.

Yay, tickets have been bought, flights are being booked, now… time to save money for the trip!

When I was 9, my parents, my brother and I took a trip around the world to visit Mum’s relatives, Dad’s friends and other family friends they had built up over the years. One place I’ve never been to though, is Australia.

I think I might have an opportunity to “jump the ditch” as they say and have a holiday over in Australia next year. A couple of our friends are heading over there for the Soundwave ’09 Festival in February/March next year. Aimee and I are hoping we’ll be able to save enough money to go too but it does mean that I’ll probably need to negotiate time off from my new job only 4 months after starting which may or may not be a problem. The concert is only for one day, depending on which city we go to but we’ll want to stay at least a couple of days.

The bands performing at Soundwave include some of my favourites like Madina Lake, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Funeral for a Friend, New Found Glory and hellogoodbye as well as some major headliners like Nine Inch Nails, Alice in Chains and Bloodhound Gang.

I’ll be straight into C# ASP .NET programming which is all new to me. They have a ton of work on at the moment so they’re hoping I can hit the ground running and I hope so too. It should be lots of fun.

I am a box-hoarder. I keep boxes for my gadgets for at least a year after I buy them, in case it breaks in the first couple of weeks, in case I want to sell it; I can sell it in the original packaging and if it wasn’t bought locally, some retailers request that you send it back in the original packaging. So, I keep boxes. It frustrates me that the packaging for these devices has to be destroyed to get into the thing.

It means that if it doesn’t work for the purpose I need it to and want to return it to the shop two days later, they can’t put it back on the shelf for full price because the whole thing it ripped apart and it means I can’t offer it to someone to buy later in the original packaging (well I guess I could but with it being in pieces, it distracts from the point of doing that).

Does anyone else have a problem with this nasty packaging or is it just me?

I don’t use the camera much at all but it is rather annoying with it broken if I do want to use it.

I’m using Aimee‘s laptop for the moment, while she is at work so it isn’t so frustrating to not have my laptop, it just lacks a few of the programs I use and all my email.

As of 12 June, the inflows into the hydro-lakes is less than in 1992, the peak demand and the average demand is above that of 1992 and the hydro-storage capacity half the average level but still twice that of the levels in 1992 so things are poised to get worse rather than better short-to-mid term. There was some mild relief over the last day or so with some rainfall into the lakes.

The power companies have set up an power-saving awareness website filled with data on the currently situation, comparisions to 1992 and tips and video on things you can do to save power. The website also has download-able posters that you can use as a desktop wallpaper or print out and stick around the place.

At this point, the situation is not as dire as in 1992, the power companies seem to still be optimistic that they can supply through the winter but without any significant rainfall in the South Island’s hydro-lakes, they’re going to be running a very fine line and if a cold-snap hits the country, the peak demand is poised to be higher than what is available which would mean some cold nights for some parts of the country if they have no power.

Independent energy experts say there is now a one-in-five chance of power blackouts because of the lowest hydro lake storage levels since the 1992 power crisis.JAMES WEIR – The Dominion Post (29 May ’08)

New Zealand’s largest power generation facility, the Huntly coal-powered station is currently supplies around 17% of the country’s power capacity. Should anything happen to this plant, the national grid would be under stress to take up the slack as the hydro-dams are running at reduced capacity at the moment. The supply companies would need to fire up expensive emergency generation facilities to cope with any significant downtime.

Faults like what happened recently at the Otahuhu Gas-fired plant and its effects make a lot of people anxious about what is going to happen with the system under this kind of load.

The situation is remarkably bad. Just to keep the lights on, New Zealanders are relying on a broken Cook Strait cable, an asbestos-riddled mothballed plant in New Plymouth, and a diesel-guzzling emergency generator at Whirinaki.National’s energy spokesman Gerry Brownlee (06 June 2008)

There is currently a political debate going on, the current government is basically saying, “its all under control, there is no problem” and the opposition party is screaming “you idiots, look, we’re close to a crisis!”. Nevertheless, there is currently investigation into legislation to allow the hydro-dams to operate their supply lakes below their environmentally-safe levels to keep up with supply.

Running the emergency plant at Whirinaki has caused the spot price on the energy market to skyrocket and the wholesale price is rising too. There is a that is due to be opened later this year. One option may be to get things moving faster and open it a few months earlier than planned.

I know I’ll be working on saving power over the next few months, there are only a few bulbs left in the house that aren’t energy-saving bulbs, I’ll be replacing those this week. Shorter showers are on the agenda too. One good thing about saving power is that it ends up saving money as well.

If I cancel and sell the phone at the 6-month mark, if I sell it for $30 less than the purchase price, I work out even as I would’ve been saving $10-a-month on prepay costs.

Anyway, that is enough about the contract, more about the phone. Now, I had a set of criteria for a new phone and a budget so my options were cut down for me quite well. Here are the reasons for choosing this phone:

Awesome Bluetooth support

It supports more Bluetooth services than anything except the Symbian-based Nokias. I use a Bluetooth integration program on my Mac called BluePhoneElite for storing text messages, sending and receiving text messages through my laptop, call logs and proximity actions. This phone had no known issues on their compatibility page and had ticks next to all the functions. No other phone in my price bracket had such good support so that was a definite tick.

Price

This phone dropped to $299 when I got it ordered so that made it very affordable ($160 after the new handset subsidy). I couldn’t justify more than $250 on a phone so that meant I gave it a tick for price.

Size

This thing is small and not very heavy. Until recently all the 3G-capable phones available here have been very bulky and ugly so the small factor of this one was pleasing.

The Style

I really don’t like flip phones, they always feel like they’re going to break when I shut them and to open them you have to either have to use two hands of jam your finger between the halves and flick upwards. It just feels like its putting unnecessary wear-and-tear on the thing. This phone is “candy-bar” style which means it is a solid, one-piece unit.

Colours

The red and black version of this phone is nice but feels a little bit tacky. What I wanted was the “Havana Gold” version which I think looks awesome.

Niggles

There are a couple of things which bug me, they aren’t deal-breakers but they are things which I think should be improved.

• You can’t change the function of the top left and top right buttons. You can reassign the directions of the navigation key but not those two select buttons. You can on Nokias like the Nokia 6085 and on the Motorola RIZR Z3 which I had before this. I don’t know whether this is a restriction added by Vodafone so that you can’t remove their shiny “Vodafone Live!” logo from the Home screen or if it simply was never a feature of this phone but it is a little annoying as I’m unlikely to want to use Vodafone Live and I’d prefer it to be something like “Bluetooth”.
• Text size in the menus. It is quite big, I’d prefer to be able to shrink it like on a Nokia 6085 where you can choose the text size for different sections.

I’ll post another blog entry later about the HID-compliant Bluetooth Remote Control Program Sony Ericssons come with which can be used to control a Mac or PC and the complementing Desktop Application for creating new remote control sets. I’ve set one up now to work exactly as I want and can perform a host of functions straight from my phone (things like controlling music).