March Weather

Well the rain has finally come. I have been home almost a month and it has rained for the first time. It will be a relief for some such as farmers, but for me I just want sunshine and no wind. However, the past week has been magnificent. I think it has been the best weather in March on record that I can remember. Hopefully winter is not too harsh as compared to two years ago when i was last here.

Hurricanes vs Crusaders

Basically the Hurricanes lost to the Crusaders last night because of one person, the referee: Steve Walsh! This person is one of the worst referees New Zealand have ever produced. He doesn't deserve to be refereeing. He enjoys himself more than the game. His ego is just too big and very bias. I am not sure if the NZRFU will ever realise this, but don't put referees of Walsh's capabilities in charge of critical games. I thought we would have learned this from last years Rugby World Cup where we had some English plonker in charge of our semi-final loss to France!!!!

NZ Cricket

Following the NZ cricket team is gut wrenching. They seem to always do quite well with bowling and fielding. However, when it comes to batting they never live up to expectations. Unfortunately they just don't have the perseverance to bat long periods of time. I think the main problem is that they simply don't play enough test matches. Another contributing fact is that players come into the team too young and haven't done their apprenticeships in the national game and the main reason why that is happening is that the older players aren't staying around long enough.

Well done to England, hopefully NZ can do better once we go to England to play the English team over there.

iPhone

Well iPhone is setup now. My communications provider (Vodafone) made a mistake when they entered the number into the big system. So I have been a week without phone access which kind of sucked since it was a long weekend and I could not get them to tell me what was wrong as they were closed.

Computer systems and user input there has got to be a better way. Hopefully Vodafone can improve on this issue for future people. But my main gripe is that the process is fundamentally flawed it should have never relied on human input! 

Being part of the IT industry what can one do to stop this kind of thing happening not just for comms companies but in general when you buy a service? Should these kind of things all be relegated to something like a vending or a ticketing machine?

iPod

I finally craved to temptation and bought an iPod (Classic 80GB) while I was in the US. However, it took me nearly three weeks to unpack and use the device.

I must admit it seems like a nice device, but overall I am not that impressed perhaps because I have used them numerous times before. I thought I would actually feel more excited about it. Maybe I am just over new gadgets etc. I am not sure it feels kind of weird as I was hoping for this great excitement when I unpacked the box and got the device to work. To me the novelty wore off after about 2 minutes.

I think I was more impressed when I got my first Sony Walkman back in 1987 from Singapore. The Walkman seemed to be way cooler, but it was perhaps due to the fact I was a kid back then and it was such a radical movement back then when as the iPod was just a natural progression, much like the iPhone.

The reason for getting the device was that it was cheaper to get in the US. Otherwise I intended at some stage to get a second hand iPod from TradeMe.

What disappoints me most is that for a cool device it is so expensive even when the device has been around for ages. Apple just likes to keep their prices very high and shaft customers.

I found Apple's online, phone, and store service not very friendly nor efficient. However, I found one store (Apple Stanford Shopping Centre) to actually quite good, but most of the shops in general are there just to put the cash in the register and give you the product. Most of the people I have talked to in the stores would have no idea on how an actual computer works or what is involved let alone these embedded / mobile devices.

I didn't go for the iPod Touch since I bought an iPhone. At least with the iPhone I have opened the box up and turned the phone on. The only thing I can't do with it is actually use it since Vodafone are slow at turning my mobile phone contract (SIM card) on ... perhaps another blog post to come about the iPhone and Vodafone trials and tribulations.

Southerly Winds

Wellington would be so much nicer if there were no southerly winds :-)

Here is a picture from the building I am located in which overlooks the city. The photo was taken by a friend of mine.

Panorama from Victoria University of Wellington, Kelburn, Wellington, New Zealand

Back in New Zealand

I am now back in NZ after spending about eight months living in Mountain View, California, USA. The American experience was good, but nothing beats home. Every time I go away my respect for NZ gets greater as a tremendous place to live. The plan is now to do more grad school studies in computer science at VUW.

Wikis Vs Blogs

After a long delay of not posting here I decided to use this software again, partly due to some inspiration from a friend of mine. Cut a long story short. I find Wikis much easier to use for blogging than Blog software. But I will still use this Blog for now.