Long time no post, but I thought you may like some of these.

A dodgy Kiwi performing Haka

Mum expressed her displeasure by blowing bubbles. Big Bubbles. Bigger than any I've done in the bath.

Ishmael



Stooging around, looking busy.





Some Fine executive level pointing.



Shameless self promotion

Some screen grabs from the Ch7 News last night.

Full story here Here just for a short time, some wilds footage from Ch 10 Here.

 

Rainbow Beach, Cutting boat, support boat & contractor's boat.

Calf entangled in Shark net, mum & friend

 

The cavalry

 

Going in for a cut, your humble correspondent standing around looking busy, but not actually doing much. 

Except looking like a finalist in a "Who can dress up most like a lego man" competition.

 

Helmet cam of cutting net

 

Last cut & he / she is free.

If you'll forgive a minor geek-gasm, compare the Ch7 footage to the Ch10 shots. 

The Ch7 chopper has a double plus sweet U-beaut gyro-stabilised camera. 

The Ch10 guy was hanging out the door with a camera on his shoulder. Sux to be him.

Couple of photos

  

"Faark, It's like China"

Hundreds of willing hands. at first it felt like we were farting against thunder but we made a major difference. I cant calculate how many tons of crap we shifted, but it must have been in the tens of tons. A complete cross section of the community; from skinhead tattooed Johnnys, International students, pony tailed hotties & octogenarians handing out sausages in bread. Restores one's faith.

Time stamp 15:01 Start with an empty skip. Get 150 - 200 willing workers and mountains of detritus. Two load masters, I dubbed them Loud Mouth & Igor. You can see Igor in his white suit. No disrespect intended, Loud Mouth recognised a need for people to be guided so he climbed into the skip and directed the army of willing hands. "Right I want fridges & washing machines first. Couches, bring me couches. Now I want wheelie bins. Now I want mattresses..." Igor climbed in and said nothing, he left that to Loud Mouth. He just hauled & shoved & grunted & heaved. He worked harder than any man I've ever seen work. I shook his hand afternoon and he just said "It's what needed to be done.
Addendum; I just noticed Loud Mouth in this shot swinging the door open.

 By 15:22, she's full as a fat girl's sock. The Bobcat operator said "There's no way I could have filled it that fast." The volunteers loaded all the bulk items, fridges, washing machines etc. The Bobcats topped off with buckets full of broken sheeting & mud.



This is the nice park out at Moggil that I and 300 other volunteers sat around in for 3 hours on Sunday morning.
Apparently BCC was overcome with volunteers and couldn't keep up with a flow of jobs to send us to. Must be hugely frustrating for those whose homes were submerged. Almost as frustrating as for the volunteers who wanted to get busy & get dirty.



Well timewasters that's it for now.












Bobette & Ubiquitis and the Flood

As this is a public blog and it is entirely possible that Big Brother may peer over my E-shoulder. As a result: I'm not discussing my employer's completely unused State Government resources or skills. <100kms from the unfolding crisis. I'm not discussing EMQ's choice to put recreational & volunteer boat drivers @ risk, while commercially qualified boat drivers sat around preparing memoranda. I'm certainly not going to "play the sob story" of people trying to retrieve wedding and baby photos from the encroaching flood. I won't bring to your attention that we had 2 latest model Hiluxs sitting in the shed when EMQ were pleading for 4x4s for the Lockyer Valley search for survivors & victims. It would not be professional for me to hypothesize that upper management were more concerned for their overtime budget than for the well being of the people who pay them. So I wont.

I will however say how damned proud I am of The Bobette & SWMBO.

And I might mention I'm looking for a new job.

Geek Question

If I butchered fatted calf on the altar of your geekdom would you shine your luciferous geekness on this poor mortal.

I have an unlisted number, sensible really given what I do for a quid.
Anyway if I dial my mobile (a bog standard Nokia on 3G Telstrarse none of your whizzo IDoovers or Crackberrys for me) from my home number the caller ID shows "Private Number." Right & fine. Also when I call home & the Bobette is on the phone ( a common state of affairs, she is 16) the Telstrarse Home Messages says "You have reached home messages 101 service of a (significant pause) private number blah blah blah." Confirms my perception of the cloaking technology is working fine, although if you have dialled the number, you'd think you might have known it, but that's bye the bye.

I had reason to call my help desk Nuffy last night and did so from the home phone. He answered "Hey Bob." Now don't get me wrong his Kung Fu is mighty, but I don't believe he has telekinesis nor paranormal psych capacities. Plenty of psychotropic capacity, but that's another story.

He runs a naked ADSL and an alcatel VOIP phone.
Apparently his phone book in his VOIP phone recognises my number. But I thought my silent number status meant that it doesn't transmit my number in the caller ID field.

WTF?
How does his VOIP phone recognise a number that I  thought wasn't transmitted?

D'ohs

Righto time wasters.

I'm not clumsy, I have pretty good hand-eye coordination, good manual dexterity and my fine motor skills are (currently) at least at par. My fitness in terms of cardio leaves a lot to be desired because I smoke. I don't use gym weightlifting equipment so I can't specify what I bench press in Kg but I'm a big strong bloke who can carry a bale of hay without much trouble. Offshore boat work is like low speed isometrics for the whole shift. After 10 hours I feel like I've walked 15 miles. I'm a plodder not a sprinter and have, can & will work for 14 or 15 hours without much complaint. In short I reckon in terms of physical capacity I'm on the good end of the bell curve.
Conceited as it may be I also think I'm smarterer than the average bear. Perhaps it's not about capacity but how I think or what I think about. I do believe I live a more examined and deliberate life.

What I lack is long term consistency in attention to detail.

I get bored. I reckon I'd be a very poor assembly line worker.

Eventually I'll miss something, overlook a detail, fail to consider the implications of a decision and it turns to custard. I then have a Situation to attend to. I reckon I could compile a two or three page long list of these Situations in my professional & personal life. The most common cause is the classic "Doing something stupid."

I think an example or 2 is in order.
Working on a jet ski in the river. Outgoing tide. I have to chat some clown so instead of spinning down the creek through traffic I direct him onto a convenient sandbank. In the past I have had to drag the ski off the bank as the tide has left it dry, so I now pick a steeply shelving spot & put it onto the bank so I can still get it off easily. Or I could "Do Something Stupid" and have to swim after it. That's professional.

A monthly production meeting at events centre in Brisbane, Item 135 on the agenda (snore): After unacceptably common incidents of damage to walls, lifts and people the big 14ft ladders are now scheduled as a two man lift. It is expressly forbidden to lift, move or carry them solo. The next day I'm, well, Doing something stupid and carrying a 14ft ladder by myself in one of the 3rd floor meeting rooms.
Do you know those little red glass bulb fire extinguishers recessed in the ceiling? If you are in a multistory commercial office there is probably one above you right now. They are remarkably fragile and surprisingly susceptible to ladder related trauma.
In the roof space the events centre has an earthquake fire-tank about half the capacity of a backyard pool so in the event they lose power and water pressure they can still extinguish a fire. I didn't see it myself, but allegedly there was a waterfall cascading down the still running escalator.

The boys I work with give me good natured sh!t about this pretty regularly and my standard response is "If I compiled a list of my best fifty fck-ups this wouldn't make the list."

This has of course stimulated me to think about such a list.
I decided fck-ups should be scored by:
Stake -What did I endanger through my stupidity.
Predictability - in hindsight is it really really obvious it would go pear shaped.
& Novelty - is it a new & exciting way to be stupid, or have you been stupidly doing this all week. (Each out of ten, sum / three)

It's not at all novel to do a U-turn in long grass in a work car. (1)
The stake is the sump of the work car & the rest of the afternoons work. (6)
It is pretty likely that eventually you'll hit something. (7) =14/30 = 4.6/10

It's pretty novel to skurf (ski on a surf board with foot loops) towed behind a four wheel drive on the beach. (7)
At 40 KPH the stake is broken bones & epic abrasion. (5)
Predictability, approaching certainty (9) = 21/30 = 7/10

Intuitively beach skurfing isn't twice as stupid as a U-turn that surprisingly goes wrong, so I think my model needs work.
It can't have a direct co$t factor as doing something stupid that you get away with can be just as stupid as those occasions when it goes tits up and you find yourself being summonsed for "Fail to drive with due care & attention," winched onto a tilt-tray tow truck or 34 sutures in one's foot. Also there is no accurate butcher's bill for when you get away with it, so it's not equally quantifiable. Unlike the grim reality to two decimal places of stupid tax - insurance excess or whatever.

Any advice?

After Action Report [edit]

Well that was most excellent.
Lets get it out of the way early - No. A forty year old snowboarding is not some kind of midlife crises or aging denialism. It is just wicked, dare I say fully sick, fun.

So as previously advertised, on Saturday morning at O'Crap O'clock we set out from the Sunny Coast for Brisneyland International Airport. On the way The ABC Radio News informed us that Christchurch NZ had taken a walloping, awesome. I was travelling with 3 friends who were half way across the Pacific Ocean En Route to Chile when the Chilleans had their seismic excitement. Now they were at it again, but this time it was affecting the quality of my holiday! B'stards. I suggested they could set themselves up for life by Not holidaying on The West Coast of the USA.
Once again my genius escapes most mere mortals.

So we rocked up at the airport and was told by the Airline Staff "We have no comms with Christchurch, it could be levelled for all we know." Out fracking standing.
So long story short, by lunchtime Christchurch was open, we flew out at 1830 ish, arrived at midnight in states of extreme dishevelment, serious fatigue & emergency.

Once again the mainstream media gave the impression that Cantabrians where marauding, splitting skulls and supping on the living goo spilt. (Christchurch is in the district/ region of Cantebury thus people who reside there are...) We saw some minor damage; most older buildings had chimneys fallen or removed, there was cracking in the car park @ Mt Hutt but other than than there was no civil unrest, no anarchy, no looting not even any lynched corpses swinging from power poles. I wasn't so much disappointed as, well you know Ready. I did feel some of the aftershocks. Interesting in a shaky kind of way.

Anyhow we made it up to Methven, sorted hotel, hired gear, grocery shopped and did all them good things you do. Sunday Night we went to the Blue Pub for dinner and didn't bother going there again for the entire trip. The wind got up to over 100Kph and we were stressing that the Mt would be closed, but everything came up Millhouse in the end.

5 full days on the snow. The helmet paid for itself a dozen times over with Epic high speed stacks. One observation is that when the vents in the top of the helmet get jammed with snow in a stack, it melts over the next hour or two dribbling icy water down your back. The onboard tunes rocked. Minor tech fail with an inability to recharge the IPod, but good 'ol Nokia saw me through. Also it seems to overheat reasonably quickly thus I was not able to wear bandito mask or balaclava under the helmet as I couldn't shed enough heat & the goggles kept fogging up. Perhaps I was just holding my mouth wrong.

So all things considered it was an excellent trip. Brother Nuffy contacted some Gastro Lurgy which required him to evacuated the contents of his alimentary canal at high speed at inconvenient hours of the evening, thus never actually got up onto the Mountain. I*Don spent 70% of his time instructing Miss K on the finer points of staying vertical and when he left her to master this, she was bifurcated by a L plate loser - instantly demolishing the scrap of confidence she had spent the whole week developing.

I slashed carved, popped and rocked. I did a couple of little baby jumps and carved down through the Exhibition Bowl at Warp Speed 5.2, or so it felt. I stacked it in many interesting a varied ways, mostly on backhand turns, but that's half the fun. After a Kamikaze gentleman who apparently could neither stop nor turn took my legs out from underneath me, I think my coxix may never point the same way again.

Was it great ? Yes.

Would I go again? certainly.

Would I wait a few days until my legs stop wobbling and my bum stops hurting? probably.

Oh and the Kiwis must surely take the award for Best Hedges Ever. The Brits may have 500 year old heritage listed hedgerows, and the septics may carve theirs into variety of topiary goodness, but nothing I've Ever seen is on the same page as the Kiwi Hedges. An easy 30 meters tall, trimmed to geometric precision and utterly impenetrable. F'king amazing!


EDIT.
Just found how to export data from the lift pass. How cool is this?