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.

I've decided I need the means to flag articles into more than one category; you will likely see stuff fielded into multiple categories from here on in (plus the odd retrospective tweak.)

In other news,
I'ts been a few days since I did much in the way of blogging.
I'm over in Washington DC at the moment on a work related trip.
It's been a fairly average week - the work aspects have been fine, but the illness i've been dealing with whilst over here hasn't been. :( Some sort of throat infection remains. At least after spending most of a day in bed on Tuesday, i'm a bit better off now...

I've just dropped a couple of fairly interesting subject items into blogs - NZ'rs really need to pay attention to the copyright law situation. Please read on...

Well the good news is that Liz'n'I have received our first stock of CardMemories.

For more info please check out http://www.jazzed.co.nz/ - this is a seriously cool idea and we're the only people in NZ with them.

It's my cute lil' monkey's 3rd birthday today.
She started it shortly after 4am this morning :)
And had a grand old day. Partay is scheduled for Sunday - wish us luck...

Last night was one of the coldest nights of the year to date.
Numerous minor accidents and road closures have been reported.

At about 10am, I took this:

Yep, that's snow in the hills above Upper Hutt. I figure that's Mt Climie... a friend tells me it's 'the ridge running north from Mt Climie' so I guess thats right.

Yeah..
A coupla days ago I blogged about the new camera I got - a Panasonic LS80 unit.
Yet... the unit eventually proved not to be one that I thought was going to suit me.
A coupla things - the first being the use of the .mov format for the internal video recording format.

Eventually I determined that I'd need to buy commercial software in order to be able to edit my own videos. What was supplied with the Camera did very little of value - and I couldn't find a free download that wasn't 'shareware'. Found a tool to convert back to .avi - didn't help.

For a little bit more money I traded up to the Canon Powershot A580.

So it's 8.0MP, 4x Optical Zoom and otherwise fairly similar. It adds better performance (as generally implied by the reviews online i've read) and some additional bits and pieces that are worth the few extra dollars.

Ohe the irony - i spent quite some time making the choice and having to revise it again so quickly was a suprise, - but have now gone a bit higher in quality stakes. Happily.

So Wifeyperson was feeling generous... and since i'm always flogging her Digital Camera she decided that I was allowed to get one for my Birthday...

I had been looking seriously at a couple of others, but this one looked like a pretty good deal - Essentially it was sub-$200 and yet retains some decent capabilities (including 8.1MP and some video capabilities).
I'm yet to play with it (only got it this afternoon) except for a few oddball shots, but Liz did get this pretty damn neat shot (it's now my wallpaper):

Niiiice kitty....

Took a few photos of my car shortly before 9 in the morning yesterday.... one of the strongest frost's ive seen in a long time (if ever)... click on through to view.