If you say 'Wedding' when you ask for your booking, expect a price hike..

We ordered a 'Birthday' cake for our wedding. Exactly the same cake - 30% of the price.

And we otherwise had a fairly 'budget' affair and still spent several thousand dollars all up.

All I can do is agree with the website - avoid the use of the word 'wedding' when generic terms can be used instead - and shop around. I'm sure a lot of the excuses for 'extra creativity' are exactly that, unless it's the creativity you're actually hiring...

Yet more evidence that the NZ Education system is creating a mediocre society: Shakespeare is too hard!.

Good grief.

Not only do we remove the concept of pass/fail with a fixed threshold (which exams did) and replace them with 'internal assessment' for far too many aspects of the curriculum, but now we're talking about simply removing 'hard stuff'.

I hated Shakespeare initially. Then with the help from an excellent english teacher I finally felt the penny drop, and began to understand exactly what made him such an incredible writer.

And English was my worst subject, bar none!

So if you get a chance, oppose this dumbing-down-of-society... again!

A quick note. Have just managed to get www.blakjak.net running to let me provide more updates. My coadmin dpa and my good friend Snooker have stepped up and helped heaps - big thanks guys - but the work continues.

At this point people with 'simple' services hosted on the machine may find their stuff is already working.
Those whos content involves active hosting (php) or databases (mysql/postgres) will need to wait a few more days... the new server is a long way from the old one and there's bandwidth limitations to get the data migrated.

The final big hit is the mailing lists I host (mainly the NZOSS) though i'm working on an improvised temporary fix for them while the new lists are built up (which will take some time.) Meanwhile the hard drive containing all our data will be shipped to Wellington.

As i'm heading overseas for work this weekend and will be away for about 9 days, i'm hoping that all will be relatively straightforward and that dpa will have opportunity to restore services during next week for those who remain.

Again my apologies for all the trouble. The new system has been a long time coming and should ultimately put things back to their normal, generally reliable self.

If anything doesn't work, doesn't look right or if you need a particular item hurried along or fixed, please don't hesitate to email me.

Folks may have noticed a services outage this afternoon...
Judginy by the rapidly increasing unreliabiilty of this server i'm going to have to rush through some sort of replacement. I'm guessing my hard drive is probably the root cause here...

Likely there will be further impact to hosted services as we engineer the relocation of 'stuff', so my apologies in advance for any impact. I'll be in touch with each hosted 'client' if there's likely to be any gotchas.

In China, anyway..

I dunno. The Internet is such a fundamental part of the world (esp for those who work in IT) and is becoming such a key to the social aspects of peoples existence, that this one strikes me as a little bit of a sore point raised by those who work and live in other 'worlds'.

Its a sign of the times.

And whilst some people who are heavily involved in 'online' stuff may be disrupted if their access to the Internet is interrupted for a period of days, I hardly see them having a nervous breakdown over it.

Beyond that, I guess i'm an addict :)

Fancy being that guy?!.

Well if you're not in NZ you may not be aware we just had our General Election, and with that the Labour Party and Prime Minister Helen Clark have been trumped by the new Prime Minister Elect, John Key and his National Party.
Worth marking; Helen Clark did achieve some great things in her time, but it appears NZ'rs wanted change.

What will be interesting over the coming days and weeks is how our Mixed Member Proportional system generates a government.

Also interesting to me... our local electorate of Rimutaka - a seat I understand that's been a very safe Labour seat for some time - was won by Labour by a very slim majority. The Labour MP - replacing the Hon Paul Swain who has stepped down - is a 'new guy' and it'll be interesting to see what transpires locally.

I with my Fire Police Unit attended the Fireworks Fantastic event in Upper Hutt.
What can I do except show you a little of what it looked like?

Always a good show. And an opportunity to plug our volunteer unit - our exploits can always be checked out on the website I maintain for them @ www.hvfp.org.nz.

The End of an Era. Or Something..