Monday, December 31, 2007

The Great Outdoors in the upper North Island


This past Saturday Bryan and I went up to the Tongariro National Park, about five hours driving time from Wellington and hiked the 17 kilometre Tongariro crossing track. This was some of the most rugged hiking that I have ever done anywhere and we trekked through a lunar-like landscape of volcanic craters that took us over 8 hours of steady climbing to complete. To reach our first point of interest, the South Crater we had to first ascend the aptly named Devils Staircase. Our highest point of elevation was when we reached the Red Crater at 1,900 metres. We had the option of climbing nearby Mt. Ngauruhoe, New Zealand’s newest and most active volcano, but took a pass when we realized that we wouldn’t have had enough time. I also didn’t relish climbing the very steep 600 metres of very loose volcanic rock to reach the summit. The last 6 or seven kilometres were mostly downhill switchbacks that I actually found more tiring to negotiate with my aching legs than I had anticipated. Still this part of the crossing afforded some fine views of Lake Taupo, New Zealand largest inland lake. At the trails end we were utterly exhausted but we agreed that experiencing this unique landscape up close was well worth all the aches and soreness. In 1990 the park was deemed a World Heritage Site.

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Whole lotta shaking going on

A 6.8 magnitude earthquake struck Gisborne this evening about 8:55pm New Zealand time. We felt the earthquake here in Wellington which is about 530 kilometres south of Gisborne. There are reports of some damage to buildings in Gisborne and a loss of power there but no reports of any injuries or death. We felt a momentary shaking in the building that houses our flat in Oriental Bay but there was no damage. New Zealand is an area where two tectonic plates collide and there is a lot of seismic activity that is reported annually. This is the first time since we arrived in June of this year that we have felt any tremors.

Friday, December 7, 2007

Spam, spam and more spam

I’m trying to remember the title of a book that I believe was published about twenty years ago. It’s a collection of dumb thoughts, observations and predictions. One of my favourites was, “Groups with guitars are no longer popular”, which was the response that Brian Epstein heard at Decca Records in 1962 when he was rebuffed in his efforts to sign the Beatles to their first record contract. There’s also, “Can’t sing, isn’t very good looking, can dance a little”, and those were the first impressions from a Hollywood studio executive about a Fred Astaire audition at the start of his film career. My all time favourite has to be these words from British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in a 1938 letter to his sister, “I looked into the eyes of Hitler and knew that this was a man I could trust”. Not included because it was only said in 2004 is, “Two years from now Spam will be solved”. That was Bill Gates speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Gates saw the solution in a variety of tools that establish the identity of the email sender. None of the suggested tools included the idea of cryptographically signing email with the sending domain’s digital signature or authenticating the sender based on what path the mail took over the internet. Yet these are the two methods that are now being used by most anti-spam software.. In October I wrote about the Domain Keys technology that Yahoo and PayPal initially developed using digital signed mail and how that has became an IETF standard this year. Path based authentication is the other tack that Spam fighters are taking in preventing it from breaching through the firewalls, blacklists and the various types of filters that have been erected as battlements. Email users don’t see spam as a big problem anymore because these methods by and large have been working in reducing the amount of spam that reaches their inboxes. But spam is still being generated in ever increasing numbers, mostly from large botnets that are composed of thousands of malware infected computer nodes. We are talking about messages that worldwide number in the billions per year so that if filtering and blocking reduce the percentage of spam mail getting through by 90%, that remaining ten percent is still a huge number in absolute terms.

Sender Policy Framework or SPF is the implementation of path authentication that has been incorporated into software such as SpamAssassin. It works by having the owner of a domain designate which computers in the domain are allowed to send email to the internet. These machine names and addresses are specified in special records on that domain’s domain name server or DNS. In essence the email receiving domain verifies the legitimacy of a given message by querying the sender’s DNS to see if the message was sent from an authorized host. Email addresses can be easily spoofed but not the IP address of a domain designated email sender. SPF wouldn’t prevent a spammer who has legitimate mailboxes on a domain from sending spam from one of those mailboxes but this is easily traced and it’s not how spammers currently work. The deficiency with SPF is that email that is forwarded does not retain the original return path and may be dropped. Also by using a DNS that has been compromised an attacker could designate his own sender authenticated hosts. However DNS attacks are much harder as these servers are usually carefully hardened with security patches applied on a regular basis. Together both path based authentication and signed mail should be very effective but unlike Bill I won’t make any predictions.

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Oh Oceania, where art thou?

Australian Prime Minister John Howard was defeated by Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd in last Saturday’s election after 11 years in power. This election story was covered by the New York Times and is posted on the Asia Pacific section of the World on their web page. I note this only because Australian and New Zealand news is not always reported by the Times. And it is not because of a dearth of news stories of substance in Oceania. In June of this year John Howard announced that the federal Australian government would take the unprecedented step of intervening in aboriginal affairs after a report was issued that there was widespread child abuse and alcoholism occurring in aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory. The story was reported by the BBC.com but not at the Times. On October 15th New Zealand police raided a number of alleged Maori terrorist training camps in the North Island, seized weapons and invoked the Terrorism Suppression Act of 2002 for the first time since it was enacted. Earlier this month the New Zealand solicitor general threw out the Terrorist act charges (illegal weapons charges are still pending) faulting the law for its “complexity and incoherence”. Neither the original arrests nor the dismissal of the terrorist charges was reported by the Times.

Bill Bryson in his wonderfully entertaining book on Australia, “In a Sunburned Country” noted that he researched the 1997 index of Times news stories and found 20 articles about Australia while Peru was reported on 120 times and Albania had 150 new stories. I would venture a guess that New Zealand faired worse for being under reported. If the Times can make room for Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan can’t it do a little better in it’s coverage of this region?

Saturday, November 24, 2007

Thanksgiving in New Zealand


This past Thursday we celebrated that most unique American holiday, Thanksgiving with our friends George and Suzy and about 60 or so other American Ex-pats at the Pines, an events venue in Houghton Bay that has an absolutely smashing view overlooking the Cook Strait. The American Women’s Association of New Zealand did a terrific job of hosting the event and of course the food and good company were the highlights. The association provided the turkey while each of us was expected to bring a dish that would feed at least 6 people. These were all of the de rigueur Thanksgiving foods: turkey dressing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cooked vegetables and an assortment of sumptuous deserts. It was a diverse crowd of Americans from across the geographical spectrum but it did seem that mid westerners from Iowa and Wisconsin tended to predominate. I guessed correctly that there was a dairy connection after I met Dr. Leo Timms, who was leading a delegation of some twenty students from Iowa State University. They were in New Zealand on a fact finding trip on New Zealand’s dairy industry. Overall I was surprised at how much fun we had as I had expected I would be down in the dumps on being separated from so many of my family and friends back in the U.S. This was one of my most enjoyable Thanksgiving dinners. Will the 4th of July down under celebration be as much fun?

Saturday, November 17, 2007

The only certainty - The Republican Vice Presidential nominee

The primary season for the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election is almost here and this will be the year when both party’s nominees will be decided before the end of February. New York and New Jersey are among 20 states that have advanced their primary dates to February 5th. We are getting closer to having a national Primary Day and with that the increasing irrelevance of each party’s summer conventions, other then them being a week long tedious commercial for the already decided in winter presidential nominee. This frontloaded calendar scheduling of the primaries will also favor strategy over tactics (and the well funded leader over the cash strapped dark horse) as events are going to happen very quickly. It will be very difficult for candidates who stumble in the early rounds of the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire’s January primary to recover in time for Super Tuesday on February 5. When Russell Baker used to have a regular column on the NY Times Op-Ed page he once wryly noted that a popular political sport in this country was seeing the front runner knocked off in the early primaries. That was usually a regular occurrence for the Democrats; witness the history from Muskie to Dean. Still it’s hard to see how Clinton, barring some unfortunate gaffe or the discovery of some previously undisclosed dirt from the always digging Republican attack machine, will lose to Obama or Edwards. The Republican contest will be the more interesting horse race as Rudy Giulani has a very tenuous lead over Romney, Thompson and Huckabee. As we get closer to the Iowa caucus the social conservative block will get more anxious over Giulani’s lead in the polls and will try to get behind one of the other three. At this point that increasingly looks like it will be Romney. Hopes are falling that Thompson would fill the shoes of that other actor Ronald Reagan and excite the faithful. They forgot that Reagan learned to speak off script in his waning days as an actor when he learned to do so successfully on the lecture tour circuit.
Regardless of who gets the Republican nomination it is almost certain that Kay Bailey Hutchison, the senior U.S. Senator from Texas will surely get the spot for the Vice Presidency. Although slightly liberal on abortion Hutchison, unlike Romney, has solid conservative credentials since she was elected to the Senate in 1994 with an ACU life time rating of 90.4. And as a woman she will help blunt the almost certain criticism that would result from an all male, all white Republican ticket. Expect her to decline when first offered but will relent after accepting the pleadings that she will be critical in preventing a Clinton-Obama administration. You heard it here first.

Mystery bird song of New Zealand


Do you remember when we spoke last Sunday and how after more than an hour of our instant messaging each other I said that I had to go? That’s because I just had that urge to go hiking along the Southern Walkway that leads up to the top of Mt. Victoria and to do it before the sun set. You hated it, how in the past when we used to go into an angry funk with each other and how I would just storm out of the house without a word and just go off walking somewhere without any purpose. We’ll it was kind of like that except this time I wasn’t angry with you it was more like, baby I miss you so and I can’t just sit here on the floor and IM you forever from my laptop because with all of this nervous energy it’s just has got to be expended somewhere. And it’s got to be before the sun sets. What made it so different this time was that anger had nothing to do with it but it was all about how I could only imagine being together and the love I felt but there was also so much longing which could only be salved if I headed up that hill and then maybe by getting out of breath in the process, I could feel that all is right with the world and get that “into the moment feeling” where you don’t think, you just do. That’s almost what happened but here’s the twist; that bird we marvelled about wouldn’t quite let me get into that meditative state. You know which bird I’m talking about? The one with that song that truly is like a human song, that we used to hear hanging the laundry out side our flat on Wilkinson and we thought was a tui but we’re not ornithologists, hell that song could be any of a number of different New Zealand birds and I just can’t trace it on the web. I walked along that trail that Sunday and I heard that song for the length of it. Like all those birds were on the same page and wanted to remind me that there was no shaking off that melancholy. Now I think that I have got the melody placed – it’s just the beginning of the theme from the film Midnight Cowboy. I saw that movie with my brother almost thirty years ago on a cold day in New York and hearing that brings me back to that time we shared together but now it will also remind me of you and the short time we had in Oriental Bay. Listen carefully to it now, just the opening bars to the theme and tell me if you agree. Dee de dee da dee dee dee.

Saturday, November 10, 2007

The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11 month of 1917

November 11th is Armistice Day here in New Zealand and Remembrance Day in Australia. It was once Armistice Day in the U.S but the name was changed there in 1954 to Veterans Day. On November 11, 1917 Germany signed an armistice that ended World War I. Veteran’s Day in the U.S. is a legal government and bank holiday but it is not an occasion in most of the private sector there for a day off from work. Memorial Day is the more important of the two U.S. holidays that commemorate the sacrifices of fallen American servicemen in all wars. It grew out of a tradition started by southern woman after the American Civil War of placing flowers on the graves of Confederate War dead. The Civil War and the 2nd World War have always over shadowed the 1st World War in the consciousness of the American public. In WWI our entry was in the final year of that conflict and far more of the American Expeditionary Forces died from the influenza epidemic of 1918 than from combat. This is in stark contrast to the losses suffered by Australian and New Zealand soldiers in what was called in the 20’s and 30’s, the “war to end all wars”. Over 16,000 Kiwis died in that conflict and on a per capita basis NZ suffered some of the highest casualties of the war. And this was when the population of New Zealand was less than a quarter of a million. That is why the November 11th observance means so much more here then in the U.S. Though it is now more than 90 years since they occurred the names of the WWI battles at Gallipoli and Passendale resonate here in the hearts and minds of Kiwis with the intensity that Omaha Beach and Iwo Jima does for Americans.

Monday, November 5, 2007

Guy Fawkes Night in Wellington

Last night they had a fireworks show over Wellington harbour for Guy Fawkes Day. This is a very curious celebration. It commemorates the unmasking of a plot in 1605 by a group of Catholics to blow up Parliament in London and kill the Protestant King James I. As an amateur historian I was familiar with the story and also how it figures into last year's overrated film, "V for Vendetta". It seems anachronistic for New Zealand, even with its Commonwealth ties to the U.K. , to commemorate a 400 year old event that occured on the other side of the globe and was really all about religious conflict. A lot of Kiwis feel that the celebration should be dropped and that they should be celebrating Matariki, the Maori new year that occurs in July instead. But who cares about history and religious conflict when it comes to a good excuse for setting of fireworks? For a few day's prior to the 5th of November stores in New Zealand are allowed to sell fireworks. I bought a couple of boxes of rockets for Bryan and we took them down to Oriental Parade to shoot off on the beach before the big show started at 9. And everyone else in Wellington had the same idea. The word is out that this would be the last year for legal fireworks in New Zealand. Personally I prefer to see the professionals do their stuff and handle the risk. But I went through same fireworks phase when I was a teenager setting off M-80s by using cigarettes for delayed fuses. And I agree with his assessment made later that night that there's a special thrill in taking lighter or match to fuse.
It was an excellent show and the first time that I have ever seen fireworks shot off from a helicopter.

Sunday, November 4, 2007

On the internet know one needs to know you're a phish

It was in July of 1993 that the New Yorker magazine published Peter Steiner's "On the internet no one has to know you're a dog" cartoon. The cartoon didn't need to explain what the internet was and some historians credit the publication date as close to that point in the 1990's when the internet became accepted into the public's consciousness. Much about the internet has changed considerably in 14 years but the authenticity of an email sender's identity still remains less than certain. Nobody know this better than those information security personnel who are in the front lines fighting spam and phishing emails. Presently the problem with spam is that the headers in an email message can be spoofed so that the sender will falsely appear to be from a legitimate domain. Spammers and phishers commonly use botnets which are essentially a network of compromised home and business computers to generate this mail traffic. Anti-spam filtering works by text scanning the content of the email's message body and looking for common words and phrases used by spammers in pushing their sexual enhancement products and hot stock tips (those spams that make it through try to scramble a little or "munge" the text as a foil). Counter-measures begat counter -counter measures and the latest is for spammers to embed images containing text to foil the filtering. To countermand that tactic optical character scanning (OCR) of the image is needed to be done by the receiving mail server and that is a very slow and resource intensive counter-counter-counter-measure. The best solution would be to utilize public key cryptography (PKI) by applying a digital signature that's signed by the sender's private key to the message body of the email. The same web of trust that makes secure sockets layer (SSL) encrypted sessions possible on the web would also validate the legitimacy of these public and private keys. Email gateways could effectively eliminate spam by filtering out untrusted email messages without blocking legitimate senders. This is a now ready for prime time solution because the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has, as of May of this year, made Yahoo and CISCO's implementation of the technology, DomainKey's, the draft standard for digitally signing all internet mail. PKI has been effectively battle tested for more than ten years and while the spammers and phishers are if anything, an ingenious and criminally creative lot, domain keys promises to finally put the kebosh on most spam.

Friday, November 2, 2007

Saying good bye to Lucy

He had been dreading this day even before she had made her final departure plans with the travel agent exactly one week ago. They had just quietly celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary a little more than a week earlier at a Malaysian restaurant on Cuba Street that they had discovered earlier in the month. Now they were going to be separated, not just for two weeks but for an indefinite period, maybe a year or more. The most ever in those 20 years. “Now this bag has some clothes that maybe Suzy is interested in for Wilson”, she reminded him that morning as she had reminded him about the bag three times earlier the night before. He thought about how he was going to even miss her propensity for nagging in that motherly manner of hers (“Please remember to put that cream on your face or your skin will look too dried out”). The taxi arrived and got them to the airport more than 2 hours early. Now was the time to appreciate the small size of Wellington’s airport and how close it was to their flat on Oriental Bay. She ordered a latte and he had a flat white at the cafĂ© near the departure gates. “I’m going to miss the great coffee here”. She caught the look on his face. “Yes there’s a lot about this country that I’m going to miss. I won’t have that splendid view of the harbour in Flushing, NY”. They talked with hope about her plans to get her nursing license and her career going and maybe deposit some money and how maybe she could return sooner than later. He felt carried along in her optimism or maybe it was that the flat white was being a particularly effective caffeine deliverance mechanism that morning. It was enough to make him think of how coffee had maybe become, in his sleep deprived middle age, his number one recreational drug of choice. They finished their coffees and headed over to the duty free shop. He joined in her perusal of the fragrances and perfumes. The names of new perfumes always seemed to him to be a variation on the theme of decadence or of promised sultry seduction. He played a game of creating new names in his head and thought of Insolence or Abandon and Miscreant. She sprayed him with one of the bottles of men’s fragrances and he was reminded on how he would miss that too. “I have to get some pineapple lumps souvenirs to bring”, she said. “Oh pineapple lumps are sooo good”, the heavyset girl at the cash register said. He took that as a cue to engage the girl in a discussion of pineapple lumps, of which he had heard a great deal of since he arrived in country but was not clear on exactly what they were. “They are pineapple candies with a chocolate wrapping and are so Kiwi and so delicious”, she said and then smacked her lips for emphasis. They walked on the international departure section which turned out to be a single gate. He said, “We might be fortunate in that I can accompany you close to your departure gate because they’ll do the passenger screening close to it” and he was right. Still only passengers were allowed past a certain point and he had to give her his impassioned kiss and embrace a bit away from the boarding ramp than he would have preferred. “The godamm terrorists have ruined the romance of saying goodbye at airports”, he said to her just before she went through the metal detector. “If they made Casablanca today Bogart wouldn’t have been able to get on the tarmac with Ingrid Bergman”. There was a large glass window where he could watch the passengers exit the boarding ramp and step into the plane. Some passengers waved at that point to their friends and family that were along side the window with him. He hoped that like them he would catch her at that moment of boarding and that they would then both wave goodbye to each other but somehow she got on and he didn’t see her. How did people stand to say goodbye 60 years ago with no email or cheap international long distance to follow up? Only snail mail letters. And maybe they were going off to war from this same airport and to not be together for 2 or 3 or more years? The plane boarded quickly, a ground crew pulled the blocks away from the nose landing gear and then it began taxiing away. He waved though he had no idea what side of the aircraft she was seated. It didn’t take long for the plane to find its position and begin its takeoff. He was waving furiously with both hands as it throttled by though he was sure she couldn’t possibly have seen him.

Tuesday, October 30, 2007

A modest proposal to the board of directors at Merrill Lynch from a former (and onced RIFed) employee.

I’m interested in the quarterly corporate earnings announcements by Fortune 500 firms. It’s not because I’m much of an investor. When I was living in the U.S. the only time I would view much in the way of financial news on CNBC was at the end of a dreary session of channel surfing with the remote. Fifty seven channels and there’s nothing on, as the Boss sings. I was always amazed at the interest and high ratings that Jim Cramer’s extremely grating “Mad Money” investment program on that network garners. I figure that there must be some real good investment advice and hot stock tips coming out of that show to make his irritating Louis Ruckyeser on steroids shtick (with a bit of Pee Wee Herman like dementia thrown into the mix) worth enduring. Rather my interest is because at some point or another in my working life I’ve been at most of the Wall Street biggies, either as a consultant or perm. So that’s why I’m always all ears and eyes for financial news about: BNP Paribas, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bear Stearns, Swiss Bank, DeutcheBank and Merrill Lynch. Merrill was the last one I worked at for 6 years until I was part of a 15,000 staff downsizing in 2003. The euphemism that management used then was “reduction in force” or RIF for short. The corporate world is averse to using the word firings or layoffs much in the same way that the funeral industry prefers “loved one” or “passed away” rather than just “dead”. Reduction in force sounds like some sort of smart military manoeuvre instead of just showing some teary employees the front door. Merrill Lynch in the past would have been most reluctant to fire employees and the firm once had the nickname, “Mother Merrill”. Actually I heard that term for the first time when an associate I knew in Municipal Bonds was fired after 20 years with the firm in early 2001. He was in shock when he announced to us that he was being separated from Mother Merrill and his anguish was palpable in the email message. Two years later when it was my turn there wasn’t much shock left; I never heard Mother Merrill mentioned by anyone. By that time Stan O’Neal had succeeded Dave Komansky as CEO and Chairman of the Board. O’Neil let everyone inside and out of Merrill know his dislike for that term and the corporate maternalism that it represented. In all fairness Stan O’Neal’s corporate governing style, as it relates to his underlings, is not much different than that of the other big captains of today’s industry who believe that there is no unspoken covenant with productive long term employees that guarantees them life time employment. I’ll spare the readers of this post any rants or diatribes against the cruel avarice of Corporate America. I certainly won’t go to any length here and relate how in the wake of the 9/11/01 attacks Merrill’s IT staff worked in an around the clock exhaustive effort for a month to keep systems and applications critical to the firm’s day to day operations running and how this extra work was made necessary by the firm’s pennywise and pound foolish decision in years past not to fund a business continuity plan. This is also not the time and place for me to say that when the dust settled a few weeks later how some of those same staffers started getting RIFed, just in time for the holidays. And I will not talk now about my experiences after leaving ML in trying to get my career back on track. If Steven King ever becomes bored with writing tales of horror beyond the grave and turning to the more macabre subject of trying to find work in America at middle age he should consult me for the basic research. No, my objective in recollecting all of this is in my expressed interest in returning to ML. The big business new today is that after presiding over the biggest quarterly loss in Merrill’s history and with many Wall St. analysts predicating that ML’s 4th quarter will be even worse, Mr O’Neil has himself been RIFed by the board and shown the front door of 4 Financial Center. In departing he will receive at least $159 million in severance along with 30 million in retirement benefits. Now that the board is looking for a new CEO I would like to propose myself as a candidate. Yes, I was just a systems guy at Merrill with no trading background. My answer is that Stan wasn’t a trader either. It’s true he was CFO for a time at Merrill and has some very impressive academic credentials. My argument is that I can do the same job of losing 2.5 billions of dollars even without a MBA from Harvard Business School. And I can do so for a lot less than the 40 million or so that he earned per annum at the helm. I’d be willing to take the job for the coolie wages of let’s say, 1 million and when my term is up, after loosing just a few million or so, I will take my golden parachute at the dirt cheap rate of 15 million. Plus Merrill doesn’t have to spend a lot in the search effort. I’m tan (it’s almost summer here in New Zealand), rested and ready.

Saturday, October 27, 2007

Doing my own production systems support

I was reminded today of why I hate to troubleshoot my own computer problems. We have had a lot of issues with our TelstraClear ISP. Easy and relatively cheap broadband access is something I took for granted back in the States. And the U.S. isn't really given high marks for universal and relatively inexpensive high speed Internet access when ranked with South Korea and other Asia Pacific nations. But compared to New Zealand I think that the U.S. fares well. Here broadband is not as ubiquitous and low cost. When I first arrived in New Zealand in June I was surprised at the dearth of free hotspots and noted that this is not the place to go wardriving looking for unencrypted access points (not that I would ever think of doing such a thing myself). Now several months later I understand fully. I don't remember running up against bandwidth limits back in New Jersey or if my Cablevision contract included them but we have easily exceeded the 4 gigs monthly that we started out with in August. With a surcharge at $5.00 per 500 meg over it can get pretty dear.

The service has not been very robust to say the least. Lucy needs the internet especially for an on line nursing exam prep course that she signed up for 2 weeks ago. Our cable modem needs to be frequently power cycled; sometimes too many times to count in a single day. Today, Saturday was particularly vexatious. I couldn't get a connection this morning and tried multiple times to reset the modem, all to no avail. It was hard to raise a support tech through the voice mail system (some things don't change regardless of what hemisphere you're in) and when I finally did, after an interminable amount of time on hold, I was told that the modem looked good on his end. I had earlier tried to isolate the problem by taking my wireless Netgear router out of the picture. That didn't work. When I tried it again at his suggestion it did. I thanked him, finished the call and then tried to put the router back into my configuration but without luck. I did succeed with Cat 5 connecting one laptop to the router but it was strange that any wireless node I set up could see the router but not get out any further. After a few hours of this I finally got to the point where my wireless devices suddenly could make internet connections. I have no understanding of what the original problem was or how it could correct itself. Any insights would be greatly appreciated. I no longer do this type of stuff for a living, as I once did, and I'm glad for that. Still I'm uncomfortable with magic pixie dust solutions.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Red Rocks Beach





We went hiking on Sunday to the Red Rocks beach near Island Bay. This is a rugged and rock strewn beach where there’s a seal colony that takes up residency during the winter. When we got there it looked like all but two seals had checked out for the season. Actually most of the fun was in the long hike to get to the sea. We started our trip at the wind turbine on the top of a hill in Brooklyn (yes, it was named after that borough of New York City. There’s a park that separates Brooklyn from the rest of Wellington and of course it’s named Central Park. Many of the streets are named after U.S. Presidents. I haven’t determined if they have also have a restaurant named Junior’s that serves great cheesecake). The wind turbine is an experiment by one of the local energy providers to determine if wind power is cost effective and profitable. It’s hard to see how it could be anything but and I agree whole heartedly with the observation that Wellington could be the “Saudi Arabia of Wind”. We hiked with our new friends and fellow American ex-pats George, Susie, their son Wilson and a group of their Kiwi friends. We were blessed with perfect weather; a clear, cloudless day that reminded me of Southern California in the late Fall but without that brown ring of smog in the horizon. The trail we hiked was about 4 kilometres along a high and rugged ridge line that afforded expansive views of Wellington, the Pacific and the snow capped mountains of the South Island across the Cook Strait. I have more pictures at www.flickr.com. Keywords to search for are DannNewZealand2007 and the photo set is called Red Rocks Beach.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

New Zealand Terror Training

The big news today was about the anti-terror raids that police launched yesterday at multiple locations throughout New Zealand including Wellington. 17 people were arrested and an arsenal of weapons including semi automatic weapons, napalm and Molotov cocktails was seized. The main focus of the operation was on what police allege were terror training camps in a remote section of the North Island. Police said that the arrested included environmental and Maori activists. Today supporters of those arrested claim that the terrorism charges are inflated and that the camps were being used to promote physical fitness.
This is the first time that New Zealand has invoked an anti-terrorism law that was enacted in 2002. New Zealand has not had terrorist acts committed within its soil as have Britain, Spain and the United States. To this writer it seems unusual to hear that a terrorist camp would include multiple groups with different causes. Besides the local media this story has been reported by Reuters and some of the British press including The Guardian. There’s no mention of this at all on the New York Times Asia/Pacific section of their world news web site.

Saturday, October 13, 2007


The Haerbin, a missile destroyer and the first Chinese warship to visit New Zealand made a ports of call stop in Wellington harbour this weekend. Lucy, Bryan and I took advantage of a rare and rainless day and went on board Sunday when the ship was open to the public. There was an impressive array on board of missile and rocket launchers along with cannons and anti-aircraft guns. The main deck of the ship was open but all of the other decks and everywhere else on the vessel were closed to the public. I suppose they don’t want to show all of the high tech sophisticated gear that the ship is reported to have on board. Anyway we had a good time just enjoying the brilliant sunshine and seeing up close what all of those American dollars spent at Best Buy and Wal-Mart are helping to build.

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Television

I’ve been thinking about television a great deal lately because now with our recently installed cable in our Wellington flat we have been watching a great deal of it. Sometimes it seems we came all the way across the Pacific so that we could watch the last episodes of “The Sopranos”. I have taken great pains in explaining to people here that that particular program captures some but not quite all of the essence of people in the great state of New Jersey. There is a lot of U.S. programming from premium channels like Showtime and HBO that is broadcast here uncensored on the regular broadcast stations but with commercial interruptions. Kiwis are much less uptight about the content of late night programs then many Americans. I can’t picture that they would have made quite the fuss over Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction a few years back during Super Bowl halftime. I like that but sadly television advertising is now pretty much the same through out the Western world. When I was a child I remember my father complaining about how television was geared to the lowest common denominator (his phrase). I was becoming an avid reader then but I dearly loved my “Twilight Zone” and “Rocky and Bullwinkle” and didn’t understand his complaint. Some four decades later I truly understand his thought. But it’s not just having an older persons perspective, television truly has changed for the worse in one important aspect. The elimination of U.S. government control on the amount of television advertising has made the medium almost unwatchable. And oh how that advertising has changed. Back then it was easier to ignore and tune out the ridiculous hard sell for “fast, fast relief” or the new and improved whatever. Now commercials have vastly improved production values and sophistication. They’ve benefited (for the advertisers) from all that psychological and focus group research in trying to make us buy. They’re hipper, smarter, louder, more visually spectacular and relentless in trying to get under the skin. Now in the interest of achieving “market efficiency” medical providers back in the U.S. have started running commercials to attract clients (no longer called patients as I’ve recently learned from my wife’s nursing text books) and these ads I find particularly wretched. They attempt to reach some warm spot in my heart with a first person narrative, usually telling me about some loved one with terminal cancer and how they are getting such wonderful end of life care from the hospital or hospice that’s being pitched. As Dorothy Parker once wrote in her review of “Winnie the Pooh”, “it makes me want to fwow up”. In New Zealand, with its national health service, I am mercilessly spared those ads. Unfortunately most of the television commercials here are distinguishable from the American kind only by the Kiwi accents of the actors and announcers. They are just as annoying and irritating.

Television programming for some time has been crafted to attract what is euphemistically called “young demographics”. But I question the usual explanation for the obsession that advertisers have for seeking the eyes and ears of younger viewers. The reason that advertisers are less interested in attracting aging baby boomer viewers is not so much because they are less open to changing brands or for trying new products. It is probably more to do with their learned cynicism in believing in the mantra that buying more stuff is fun and will help make you happy.

With the obvious exception of public broadcasting the main content of television is the advertising and the programming is really just filler. It’s ultimately a passive medium and we needn’t surrender so much of our waking hours to it. But first I must catch the finale to “Nip and Tuck”.

Sunday, October 7, 2007

Oh the humanity! - More woe in the world of sports.

Sometimes the worst thing that can happen in politics or sport is to be the pre-ordained winner. It happened to Thomas Dewey in 1948, to my beloved 2007 New York Mets and now to the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team of 2007 who were eliminated from the Rugby World Cup in a quarterfinals match Sunday against France 20-18. The word everywhere in the rugby world was that this was going to be their year for winning the cup. Not being sufficiently rugby wise I accepted this as gospel and that victory would be a sure thing. Now Monday has been a day of much wailing and gnashing teeth. There is a lot of anger at Coach Graham Henry and calls for his sacking. Threats have been posted on websites calling for the head of the English referee for missing a forward pass (not allowed in rugby) by the French team that resulted in their scoring a critical try (like a touchdown – but 4 points). New Zealand has invested much of its national pride in the All Blacks. 1905, the year the team went on a northern hemisphere tour and lost only to Wales is considered a year of historical note in Michael King’s, History of New Zealand and this is also mentioned in official immigration guides on life in New Zealand. New Zealand last won the cup in 1989 and apparently has had victory snatched from them by Australia and the U.K. in World Cups since then. Those prior cup defeats constitute serious choking in the media and despite the build up of this year’s team there was much discussion of the ABs being lost in the wilderness all these past years. One sportswriter here in the New Zealand Dominion Post newspaper was sufficiently knowledgeable of American baseball and wrote a few weeks ago of the 86 year "curse of the Bambino" that afflicted the Boston Red Sox until 2004 and he mentioned a celebrated ailing Bosox fan who held on to life just until Boston defeated St. Louis to win the Series for the first time since 1918. Probably a better example would have been the Chicago Cubs who were swept in their series this past weekend with the Arizona Diamondbacks and failed to advance to the National League Championship series. Next year will be the 100th anniversary of the last time the benighted Cubs won the World Series. Kind of keeps the All Black’s World Cup losing streak in perspective.