The new metric system: I’m following the car in front at the correct distance. Cf. the drivers in the other lanes.
Now that I live in the northern suburbs, I have to go on the motorway far more frequently. Itâs become apparent that New Zealand has had a complete change of measurement system and I was unaware of it.
I thought we were on the metric system but apparently, there is a new metric system at play these days.
When the âsmartâ motorway speed limit signs display 60 km/h, a handful of drivers, like me, go at the old 60 km/h. But there is evidently a new 60 km/h, which we oldies called â80 km/hâ. If the other drivers are not breaking the law, the majority of cars in this country appear to have had speedometers newly calibrated to the new metric system. When the sign says 80 km/h, they will travel at between 90 and 100 km/h. It doesnât quite explain why, when the sign says 100 km/h, so many drive at 90 km/h, but thatâs the incredible nature of the new metric system: unlike the old, itâs not proportional.
Iâm not entirely sure how the system converts metres or seconds, as I seem to do double the following distance of the majority of drivers. From memory, itâs 40 m at 100 km/h, or, if you want to adopt the 1970s slogan from the UK, or the one uttered by the late Peter Brock, âOnly a fool breaks the two-second rule.â The new metric system at play in New Zealand means that the new 40 m is the same as what we old-timers called 20 m. Or, if theyâre going by the clock, two seconds is what we used to call one second. I assume this new metric system also applies to penis length for men, so they arenât too disappointed when their 7Âœ cm is now called 15 cm. Sounds so much bigger, doesnât it, lads?
Now, I could be wrong about there being a new metric system in this country. Itâs simply that many people donât understand speed and distance, or how road signs work. If you are male and think that 20 m really is 40 m, then maybe you have a small dick and have been convincing yourself otherwise, and the problem is multiplied on the roads. Sadly, however, this lack of awareness of time and distance isnât exclusively a male thing.
As a nation, weâve been so busy for such a long time blaming âAsian driversâ that our standards have dropped like stones. It wasnât that long ago when we Wellingtonians mocked Aucklanders for their âMerge like a zipâ signs in the mid-2000sâyet it seems an increasing number of us in the capital are now just as clueless on how traffic merges into a single lane.
All this makes you wonder if Greg Murphy was right when he suggested we should re-sit our driving test every 10 years.
For reasons unknown to me, May seems to be a quiet month for my blogging. I looked back to 2010 and usually, this is the month I blog less. Maybe itâs the change in seasons, or I find other things to occupy my time.
This year, itâs been far more eventful, as on the 10th inst., we moved. Thirty-six years at the same address, and Iâm now in the northern suburbs of Wellington. The postal code has changed from a 6 to a 5 at the beginning, which gives you an idea of just how far north we went.
As a middle-aged man I donât need to be that close to town any more, and since Iâve always worked from home, all I really need is a stable and reliable internet connection. We need space for team members who work for me on-site, which we now have far more of. The internet connection is the one thing that really needs work in terms of my daily routine, since we are on multiple levels, and D-Linkâs Powerline âmains modemsâ have not been that good here, while Vodafoneâs Ultrahub also loses too much in terms of bandwidth in different parts of the property.
Above: There’s too great a loss of bandwidth through the D-link Powerline units. The top screen shot is a device plugged into the Vodafone Ultrahub near the Chorus ONT.
Itâs goodbye Evans Bay views (which have never been the same since the Indoor Sport Stadium was erected at great additional unnecessary expense to ratepayers; a clear reminder not to trust certain establishment politicians) and hello to rolling hills and native bush.
It hasnât all sunk in yet, as Iâve been working while the move has taken place, and havenât had the time to enjoy the process. Rationally, I know we made the right decision, otherwise weâd never have done it, but other than the last half-hour at the old place, letting the memories of each room flood in as I walked through for the last time, I havenât been particularly emotional. In fact, when the buyers of my old home signed, I was actually happier for them than I was for myself, since they had been searching for a while, and I felt they got a good deal. Here they were, third time lucky in this street, and getting the largest house on the largest section, and, with the greatest respect to my former neighbours, a more solid one, too. (Yes, Iâve knocked on your timber inside over the years.) They have a view which they never would have had in the other places.
They additionally have a connection to a former resident on the street, which I wonât go into publicly; and one partyâs father actually came from the street we moved into. Also in one of those âvery New Zealandâ coincidences, one dear friend who helped me move headed to Ćtaki that evening, and told a woman there that he had been helping us. It turns out that she was the sister of one half of the couple that previously owned our new home. These seem to be very âharmoniousâ events that appeal to my heritage, the sort of signs that to others might signal that âitâs all meant to beâ if you were seeking something beyond the rational.
In one year, in a street of 14 homes, four properties have changed hands; if you count the place on the corner of the street (which technically isnât part of it), itâs five properties. If anyone were to write its history (not that anyone would), 2018â19 was the period of a sea change in terms of the people there.
Weâre still living among boxes, and there are still two storage unitsâ worth of stuff that we need to empty out, but weâll just have to take things one step at a time. We filled a skip full of old stuff, and probably could have filled a second, once you added the miscellaneous trips our friends and I made to the tip. But on this end there are still a few things that need to go.
For the last two years, the Mary Potter Hospice has been the principal beneficiary of the nicer items, which included new things that my parents and grandmother acquired but never used.
One remarkable thing is how well the old furniture fits with the new place, and, interestingly, how comparatively poorly it fitted with the old. Itâs as though my family bought for this house. When you look back over four decades, you get a sense of how things do intersect and come together, if youâre lucky, and we certainly regard ourselves as very lucky indeed. It makes me happy that things have worked out on many fronts, save for my Dadâs Alzheimerâs disease. Perhaps for him, too, there is a silver lining: we have wound up closer to him, so a drive north only takes 16 minutes (on a good day) rather than close to an hour.
Yesterday, we visited the old street to collect the last bits and pieces out of the garage, and said hi to one of our former neighbours. Weâll visit others we didnât have a chance to farewell, since the move out took longer than planned, and we had to dash off to get to the new place that day. That neighbour had been there for 60 years, and had seen everything from one couple having an argument where the woman chased the man with a shotgun round the grounds of Rongotai College, to the residents that had come and gone over the years. Interestingly, she didnât remember a case of arson (to an old Humber car) in the 1980s, to which the fire brigade was called; but other tales remained as clear as day.
I wonât go into the nitty-gritty as there are many tales to tell, and Kiwi motorway behaviour is pitiful in so many cases as we drive up north. And for privacy reasons, I wonât blog too much just yet about how weâre finding the new place, as weâre still adjusting to it ourselves. I will say the former owners were meticulous, filling up and painting over walls where things were once mounted (unless they used those 3M strips), and we are ever so grateful to them.
I rented a couple of trucks over the last few days, and Iâm surprised that automatics have taken such a hold in this country.
Iâve written about my preference for manuals elsewhere, and for a regular car, I would consider one with a sequential gearbox. Weâre in an era now where the advantages of a modern automatic can outweigh those of a manual, notably in fuel economy. Generally, however, having the control of a manualâand not having an atrophied left leg while drivingâis my preference, and itâs absolutely fine even in gridlock if you know how to control the gears properly. I grew up with the idea, rightly or wrongly, that a good driver knows how to operate a manual and desires the control that it affords.
Polling my friends, it appears that half have the same preference as me and many note, âBut I own an automatic because I couldnât find a manual.â Itâs true: weâve become a slush-box nation just as the United States has, going from a country where maybe 10 per cent were autos to one where 90 per cent are. A big part of that shift happened this century. The notion that automatics have been market-driven (as I was told at Brendan Foot) is, as far as I can ascertain, bollocks. In 2015â16, I went to some extremes to buy the car I wanted, namely one with a manual transmission, by sourcing one from where the majority of drivers still prefer to shift gears themselves: the UK. I understand that the UK, as New Zealand once did, insists that you do your driverâs licence test in a manual if you want to be able to drive both; should you do it in an auto, youâre restricted to just autos until you ‘upgrade’ to a manual licence. Indeed, the latter position invites ridicule in the UKâDaniel Craig got his share of it after a fake-news piece alleged he didnât know how to drive a manual.
This UK licensing position still makes sense to me, but it appears we license people to drive manuals even though they have never seen a clutch in their lives.
One of the young men helping me out with shifting stuff in the truck, who is on a learnerâs, and owns an automatic, said to me that he couldnât comprehend a manual, and that confirms that we may have it wrong with our licensing system by slavishly following the US.
And after the weekendâs experience, Iâm even more wedded to manual transmissions.
The first truck from Vancy Rentals was a two-tonne Toyota Dyna with a slush box. For the most part it wasnât too difficult to drive, except for one corner when I had to turn off the Hutt Road (speed limit 80 km/h) to head up Ngauranga Gorge, while carrying a load. I didnât consider that I was going too quickly but the truckâs gearing did not change down with the speed reduction, and I had to rely solely on heavy braking to slow the vehicle. I wrestled with the steering wheel to keep it in my lane but came close to crossing the line.
You can put this down to inexperience and you would be partially right. With hindsight, I could have turned off the overdrive, or changed to D-4, but in my opinion autos have a tendency to make you lazy. Itâs the equivalent of a point-and-shoot Instamatic camera: acceptable but not what a professional might demand for full control.
The second was a larger 2·5 tonner from Hino, but with a five-speed manual transmission. That corner was taken cleanly (with an even heavier and higher load) by shifting down, and it was simple heading down Ngauranga later by changing into a lower gearâexactly what the sign at the top of the Gorge suggests you do. It kept the truck to a maximum of 80 km/h, the legal limit down that stretch. (I also accomplished this with D-4 on the Toyota.) It was at this point that my young helper remarked that he couldnât understand the manual, so I pointed out that it was the gearing that was keeping us safely within the speed limit, not the brakeâby having that additional security I wouldnât be reliant solely on the truckâs braking system.
That same thinking applies to my driving in a motor car, and I wonder why one wouldnât want the extra assurance of having chosen the gear yourself, limiting your speed when needed, and not be dependent on the decision of a gearbox engineer in Japan (or elsewhere) who mightnât understand Kiwi roads.
I never planned to spend quite this much on computers in the first two months of the year. The laptop was in dire need of an upgrade, so I had budgeted for it. After getting it, I was impressed, but thought that the desktop PC, which dates from 2012 and upgraded with a Crucial 525 Gbyte SSD just over two years ago, was holding its own. The processor might have been slow, but then, Iâm a middle-aged man with reflexes slower than that of a 20-year-old, so I hardly noticed. I thought, best-case scenario, Iâd look at an upgrade at the end of 2019.
Last Wednesday, the PC wouldnât start properly. I was incredibly lucky as I had backed up all pertinent directories the night before, and only lost a bunch of frequently used scans (which can be re-created) and some text files where I wrote down some drafts. In the grand scheme, this was the least amount of data I had ever lost, and Iâm very old-school: I still download emails with a client and burn mailbox archives on to DVD.
The original diagnosis was a faulty SSD, where the operating system lived. The computer kept booting on to the secondary hard drive, which I used prior to the SSD. The hard drive was cloned in 2016 and became a storage drive, but I never deleted the old OS from it. The plan: get a new SSD and clone it again.
I took the computer to Atech, where I was a regular visitor anyway. I had even discussed the possibility of buying a PC from them. The boss, Kidd Liang, began cloning the hard drive on to a fresh Samsung SSD, which he believed would be more reliable than the Crucial. But after attempting the process twice, he said there were too many bad sectors on the hard drive for the cloning to be successful. Based on the noise, he deduced something else would bite the dust: either the power supply or the graphicsâ card. Nevertheless, he plugged the SSD into the PCâand it was at this point the power supply failed.
Iâve seen multiple faults like this beforeâI had one machine in the 2000s die with a motherboard failure, then a CPU one, within 24 hours. Kidd said I was incredibly lucky as someone who had done a major back-up, because I then faced the very real prospect of needing a new desktop PC. I was able to continue working on Wednesday night thanks to my laptop, and when it was plugged in to my big monitor, I finally noticed the speed difference of a modern machine versus my old one. And I liked it.
Therefore, it was with some excitement I collected my desktop PC from Atech on Saturday morning. I didnât want to go overboard but at the same time needed to do some future-proofing. Kidd calls it the âvintage gaming seriesâ, as he reused my old Cooler Master case and DVD-ROM drive, along with the top fan, but everything else was replaced. It’s like one of those Singer Porsches: old on the outside, new on the inside. My existing Windows licence worked on the new machine. Inside was the Samsung along with a new 2 Tbyte hard drive; the 1 Tbyte I had was also installed, even if it has bad sectors. Itâll be the back-up of the back-up.
Going with a six-core Ryzen 5 2600 isnât as impressive as the laptopâs i7-8750H, but once the programs are running I donât notice much difference (middle age again). Thereâs an Aorus X470 motherboard, 16 Gbyte of RAM, and instead of going with Geforce, I decided to see how a Sapphire Nitro Plus Radeon RX 580 with 8 Gbyte on the video would be like.
While everything is more stable and faster, I donât get a sense of a major leap, probably because of the 2016 SSD upgrade. Nevertheless, itâs given me a fresh start for 2019, with some old software (e.g. Gammadyne Mailer) not having made it on to the new machine. More time-consuming was getting the fonts right: Windows 10 now selects a user directory for some of your fonts and these do not appear in the registry (the trick is to change the permissions of the fontsâ folder, and make sure the fonts are installed for all users). And, once again, the reliability index has gone from 10 to 1 because Windows seems to be allergic to either software or usage. Thereâs still the odd program that needs to be installed, but as the weekend draws to a close, weâre almost there. The coming weekâs going to be a busy one and itâs nice facing it with new tech.
I have to give Atech public praise, too. When I bought this computerâs predecessor at PB, you could still do a deal with the local manager, and you had the sense you werenât just a number. Drew and Mark really looked after me. PB has deservedly grown because of its keen pricing and marketing, but as it has done so, you now get the feeling that itâs no longer the friendly, small retailer that it once was, with all of the promo coordinated in Auckland. Kidd at Atech on Cuba Street brings me back to that one-on-one feel: you could talk to the boss and do a deal. Matt, who usually served me at Atech since the Wakefield Street days, did the same. You arenât just a number here, and it was a pleasure to be able to chat through my exact requirements and have a rig built to my specifications and (meagre, post-laptop-buying) budget.
On this Pope Gregory Arbitrary Calendar Start Day, I wrote to a contact of mine at Renault New Zealand.
In mid-2018, I joked that, since Renault had no dealers in Wellington (never mind what’s listed on their websiteâthe only people who can see a dealer there are psychic mediums), I could sell them out of my house.
Today, I may well have gone some way toward doing that, as someone I know would like a test drive of a first-gen Captur after I put it into her consideration set. After all, I put my money where my mouth is with Renault, so when I recommend one, I do so with some authority.
In the same note, I detailed some observations about Renault New Zealand’s marketing. I have since forwarded it to their top man in the country.
I concluded all that with, ‘And I reckon Hiroto Saikawa is dodgy and he was trying to cover up his own incompetence by framing his old boss and mentor. But that’s another story.’
Even if I sold one car, I might become the city’s top Renault seller. ‘If you find a better car, buy it.’
Above: Dad and I wait for his psychogeriatric ‘re-evaluation’ on November 30, or, treading a path of bullshit.
Even in the rest home, Dad remained very protective of the other residents, so much so that there was an incident involving a day care resident in late November that saw the home insist that he be re-evaluated.
I said to the head nurse, âI just want him to be given a fair go. What are the chances he will be allowed back there?â
âIt depends on what the psychogeriatrician says.â I sensed the insincerity in her voice.
For when the psychogeriatrician from Wellington Hospital called (actually, he told me he was a âpsychiatristâ and to this day I remain unsure if a psychogeriatrician or psychogeriatric nurse has seen him), he told me that he was told that they didnât want him back.
Lie number one, then.
This is despite a course of medication that has actually helped Dad with his alertness.
Of course, during this whole evaluation, Dad contracted pneumonia, for which he had to be on a course of Augmentin.
The âpsychiatristâ also told me that he would prescribe Risperidone to Dad as the original course of medication that I had discussed with our GP, Donepezil, was, in his opinion, ineffective.
When speaking to the nurses and health care assistants at Ward 6, I was always informed that Dad was taking Augmentin and Risperidone.
He was still having balance issues and a severe cough but deemed âmedically fitâ and had to leave the hospital.
The social worker worked extremely hard to find a dementia care unit for him. I have him on a waiting list at one home, but till that place is free, the closest is Bupa in Whitby.
Iâm now reading his discharge sheet, to discover that he is âBest suited for dementia level care or high dependency care if BPSD cannot be treated successfully.â Note the word if.
Frankly, they havenât had a chance to see if any course of medication has helped his BPSD. I have witnessed it, to my knowledge, they havenât.
Everyone seems dead keen to get Dad into dementia-level care that heâs being pigeonholed.
So he was, in my non-medical opinion, prematurely discharged and shipped off to Bupa.
And the discharge sheet doesnât mention anything about Risperidone other than that it is PRNâprescribed only when needed. It doesnât appear to be a regular medicine.
So, was I lied to at Wellington Hospital or is the discharge sheet bullshit?
Lie number two, then.
Iâm not saying that Dad wonât eventually have to go into dementia-level care but it doesnât seem necessary, and the Bupa staff agree.
Today I discovered him agitated because he was hungry.
The staff said he hadnât been eating.
He was brought his dinner but I noticed that his dentures were missing.
No shit, you took his dentures so he couldnât eat.
But no one put two and two together.
Seeing I was there he made a valiant effort to try to eat some cold meat they had served him and choked horribly on it. I had to stop him and said I would enquire what was going on.
The carers made a good effort looking in his room to no avail.
No one was at reception but fortunately there were some cellphone numbers posted on a notice there. I texted one of the RNs, who, despite not working today, made a massive effort to find out what had happened. God bless this man for digging.
Turns out they took Dadâs dentures for cleaning last night and no one thought to return them. They were in the office, locked away.
All of this has me deeply angry that they think they can treat elderly people like this. And how poor the communications are because they aren’t treating them as human beings.
If I wasnât a daily visitorâand driving from Rongotai to Whitby is no easy taskâthen would Dad have just starved?
He has aphasia so he can only point and show if heâs upset.
One RN told me he was agitated earlier today. Again, no shit.
Iâve texted the social worker my concerns. Discharging a patient prematurely is one thing but taking him to a facility where they have effectively starved him for a day is cruel and negligent.
All this sprung because of the clinical and inhuman way he was marginalized in late November.
It set off a chain of events that give you very little confidence in the treatment of Alzheimerâs and dementia sufferers.
Despite the kindness of the HCAs and the staff at Wellington Hospital, there are clear gaps here which I wonder whether others might question.
I will advise the GP tonight as he and the social worker have batted in our corner consistently.
He needs to be out of the clutches of a clumsy multinational corporation and put somewhere actually consistent with his level of dementia.
And if I donât get some satisfactory answers for once, then things will get ⊠interesting.
Above: If phones were sentient beings, it probably is a bit mean to have the old phone take a photo of its successor.
After a drop to the ground (and by that I mean the hard floor at the local Pak ânâ Save) produced lines on the screen of my old Meizu M2 Note, I decided to upgrade to the M6 Note. The familiarity of the Flyme interface was one big reason, though it’s only now, after 12 hours of fiddling, that I’m only slightly happy with how it all went.
The experience was quite unlike the previous purchase, which went incredibly smoothly. The trouble seems to stem from Meizu offering a New Zealand-specific version of the M6 Note, model M721L.
Why didn’t I buy it from a Chinese vendor like last time (when there were no New Zealand retailers)? It seems that all the Ebay vendors were selling global editions of the phone, too, so for the sake of a few dollars, I wanted the support of a local vendor. If there wasn’t much difference between a global phone and a Kiwi one, should it matter? After all, this phone is on Flyme 6·1·4·1G (G for global), and according to one page on the Meizu forums, all I needed to do was download a Chinese Flyme OS patch and it should upgrade and change accordingly.
Problem no. 1: it doesn’t work. It might have worked for one user, but every patch I tried (and they take nearly two hours to download from Meizu’s website) ended with a ‘Firmware corrupt’ (if you were lucky to even get an error message) despite the ZIP files all verifying correctly.
Resigned with the fact I could not turn the M6 Note into a Chinese one, I had to root it to remove the Google bollocks.
Problem no. 2: Meizu has taken away the easy access to rooting the phone. This method does not work, either, at least not this model. After about six hours, I stumbled on the solution: you can follow the above method but switch your phone to Easy Mode first.
Once rooted, I began removing anything Google, for reasons followers of this blog know well.
After downloading the familiar apps, I did encounter some issues. First, the Chinese app store and the global one have different software. Weibo is an international version, for instance. The default music and video apps are much crappier for export, missing the Chinese content (which sometimes included international TV series), and going straight to the local directories.
We do live in an age where the Chinese versions of software can be better than the western ones. Indeed, it was during my experimenting with my previous Meizu phone that I discovered that Chinese designers were creating more visually pleasing and user-friendly apps than their occidental counterparts, at least among the programs I needed.
While there’s obviously a jump up in terms of speed (I bought the 64 Gbyte version) images seem to render duller on the screen.
Then there were the usual problems of photo and music directories from the transferred SD card not appearing in order, which isn’t uncommon.
While I’ve yet to give the phone the acid test (daily use, taking photos and videos), I haven’t really been wowed by the experience of setting up. It was far easier in 2016, with better results. It’s going to be a useful phone, and I thank Charlotte at PB Technologies Wellington for her advice, but if I had the time, I would have waited till a friend went to China and asked them to bring a Google-free one back.
PS., December 4: Solution to getting the Chinese version of Weibo: since my old phone wasn’t completely dead (and will remain in service as long as the screen holds up), I went to its App Store, which is Chinese, got the URL for Weibo there (through sharing it), visited it on a browser on my new phone, and installed from there.
Given the topic of this post, some of you will know exactly why this still, from the 1978 Steve McQueen movie An Enemy of the People, is relevant. If you don’t know, head here.
Admittedly, I was getting far more hits on this blog when I was exposing Facebook and Google for their misdeeds. Of course I have less to report given I use neither to any degree: Facebook for helping clients and messaging the odd person whoâs still on it (but not via Messenger on a cellphone), and Google as a last resort. I shall have to leave all this to mainstream journalists since, after a decade on this blog, itâs all finally piqued their interest.
It also seems that my idea about pedestrianizing central Wellington, which appeared in my 2010 mayoral campaign manifesto (which I published in 2009) has finally reached the minds of our elected mayors. Auckland has a plan to do this thatâs hit the mainstream media. I notice that this idea that I floatedâalong with how we could do it in stages, giving time to study traffic dataânever made it into The Dominion Post and its sister tabloid The Wellingtonian back in 2009â10. Either they were too biased to run an idea from a candidate they âpredictedâ would get a sixth of the vote one actually got, or that foreign-owned newspapers suppress good ideas till the establishment catches up and finds some way to capitalize on it. Remember when their only coverage about the internet was negative, on scammers and credit card fraud? Even the ânet took years to be considered a relevant subjectâno wonder old media are no longer influential, being long out of touch with the public by decades.
To be frank, my idea wasnât even that original.
If you are on to something, it can take a long time for conventional minds to come round.
