Month: June 2006

Ok, first thing I have done you may not have noticed: I have added subscription functionality to my blog. So now you can receive an email every time I make an update.

Cornelia: I have subscribed you already, because you were complaining before that I don’t tell you what’s going on. You have no excuses now, since you’ll receive an email every time I write anything :p

Another thing I have been working on is my Geographical Positioning Systems. I bought a GPS receiver (the last one on that site) which I have been playing with for a while now. I am quite impressed. It was cheap, only about AU $130, but it comes with all the trimmings: car charger, wall charger, USB charger. Continue reading GPS Tracking

So I am now officially a New Zealand citizen! The ceremony was very nice. There were only about 20 people there so it was quite cosy.

The person leading the ceremony made it out to be a very special (almost spiritual) occasion. I disagreed with him a little there. For me, the special / spiritual occasion had already happened many years ago, the moment I set foot on New Zealand soil. A date I will forever remember: December 5^th, 1997. Continue reading I never swear

Well, after a great deal of toing and froing, my citizenship ceremony is scheduled for Thursday 15th June at 1pm. It will be at the Auckland Citizenship office at the AA Centre, level 6, 99 Albert Street.

The “Texas Counters” on the left hand side give you a good idea of the number of seconds remaining before my citizenship is confirmed.

After the ceremony, I can apply for a passport, that takes 3 days minimum if I pay them money. This means that, allowing for shipping and suchlike, that I can expect my passport by the 22nd of June.

Edit: You know, after showing these cool dynamically updating counters to my family, Arth says: “I’ll just print it out for your Mom”.

^^;;

My hands are still shaking with adrenaline as I write this. Sarah & I were coming home from lunch down Triploi road (A), past a primary school on our right and a dairy (tea room) on our left. I passed a rather unremarkable car on the side of the road. It was a dark blue station wagon. Later Sarah tells me it was probably a Subaru Legacy, one of the most popular cars in New Zealand. He looked like he was meaning to turn out into the street, but he didn’t have his indicators on, so I passed him. Click on the map to the right to the the details of our little trip with markers.

As I passed, I realised he was pulling off in spite of me. So I sped up a little so as to take over smoothly and indicated to the left to signal my intention. Instead he speeds away, Sarah yells “careful!” and I shift over to the right as he bolts past me. I hear his engine hum impressively as he motors past and I try to avoid hitting the oncoming traffic.

“Holy fuck!” Sarah commented sedately as he sped away “Yeah, that was fucking weird” I said. We were considering reporting him to someone when we suddenly saw something that made our blood run cold: the passenger’s door flew open and someone tried to jump out, gave up and closed the door again, or perhaps they were pulled back (B). Continue reading The Chase

I downloaded a nifty open-source tool the other day. It’s called FMA or Float’s Mobile Agent. It’s a lovely little tool which connects to your mobile phone through a bluetooth COM port and sucks all the data from your phone onto your computer. It’s great, I especially like the fact that it can tell the temperature of your phone!

Anyway, so it grabs all your meetings, contacts etc and then you want to synchronise with Outlook. I tried it, and it failed. Damnit! Damn stupid open source software I cursed fluidly. Continue reading I can program