The satirical site http://www.miningnsw.com.au/ was taken down twice recently by pressure on the ISP, presumably brought by the mining lobby (whose site, http://www.nswmining.com.au/ was being satirised).

It's back up, but I'm still pissed off. When someone tries to silence debate, that reflects badly on them. When multimillion dollar primary industry lobby groups do so, that reflects badly on our country and our society. When they do so through pressure and censorship, there should be a reaction of fury and flying feathers.

Let's stay vigilant people. This shit matters.

OK, so it's my second Southern Summer. Drove down to the Coromandel.
Checked out hot water beach - pretty cool; you get a shovel, and at low tide, warm water wells up under the sand, so all you have to do is dig a hole, and you've got your very own warm bath till the tide comes in. A warm bath with a spectacular view of Cooks Bay's palms, cliffs, and golden sands at that.
Claire drove us along the unpaved route 309 on the 1st of January, and we stopped at a fantastic little hostel in the middle of nowhere, and had an evening drinking beers, playing petanque, and talking crap with Jonty, a Belgian TV spot director, and an unnamed Canadian guy who was extremely enthusiastic about the benefits of auto-urine therapy. In detail. For hours. No shit.
On the 2nd, we headed further along the 309, and went swimming by a waterfall. Further on we came to Coromandel Town, which was having a "keltic fayre" complete with didgeridoos and maoris. I found a couple of T-shirts I'm very pleased with (including a pink one featuring a pig dressed like Napoleon from Animal Farm). So now its the new year, and I'm back at the code face, and I'm being moved from code-monkeying to a technical writing position next week, and I'm signing up for an evening course in Technical Writing, and Claire's mum arrives on Saturday from England via Kuala Lumpur, and we're off to Australia in a few weeks, and our flat sale in London completes in 10 days' time, and our mates are round for dinner tomorrow, and on the 13th we're flying to Queenstown to start our two week jaunt round the South Island, and I'm trying to sort out the paperwork for Ra to come to Australia as a working holidaymaker, and Fran's house purchase in Portugal has fallen through but I'm guarantor for her interest payments so that could get painfull, and my fucking project at work has to be code complete by FRIDAY WEEK... And still I don't listen when people caution me that I do too much.
There is much to be 5ynical about, but it's all good.

Futile Attraction is out on DVD (see http://www.makemarksmovie.com/).
I saw it a couple of weeks back, and there are laugh-out-loud moments. All geeks will feel for the male lead, and that's all I'm gonna say.
My side-project search-engine went into Beta this week (see http://www.hashi.sh/). This comes immediately after a nasty week of server outages, software SNAFUs, and general instability that's been enough to make even the windows-coddled kiwi wish he'd snuggled up to the old Torvalds-penguin and just hosted the fecking thing on a Linux box where you can see why stuff doesn't work by JUST EDITING A MOTHERFECKING TEXT FILE.
Ah, that's much better, got that off my chest.
So, what else is new?
The co-leader of the NZ Green Party just died of a heart attack. Bit nasty. The silver lining is we should get a certain dreddlocked MP called Nandor Tanczos back into parliament - he stirs it up a bit in a good way.
We've just accepted an offer on our Brick Lane flat, and are severing all ties with the Northern hemisphere - gutted, not.
My nature-loving mum is pursuing a protracted struggle to get freehold on a house in a nature reserve... She doesn't read slashdot so I can safely say - "duh - if you like empty unspoilt nature so much, what makes you think you're so special they should make an exception and protect a big swathe of land from everyone but you?"
I Just re-read my journal entry from a few weeks ago where I said I was at my limit of sitting in a team of Java developers and doing VB3 coding.... Well, I was right, it didn't last! I'm now at http://www.serkoonline.com/ doing some .NET stuff, and keeping my beak sharp.

The kiwi is still angry.
Keep watching the pies.

Spent much of the weekend burning music and data CDs for my mum and brother. They need everything coz Ra's 14.4 dialup is too slow to download it there (in rural Portugal, even 14.4 is a very "nominal" bitrate). I'm going to sort them out with Firefox, Win2K, winrar, ultraedit, and all the other little tools that make using a PC bearable. Its interesting that, while some of what I'll send them is just plain unlicensed, a lot of it (Win2K, MS Office for example) is software that they had licensed versions of, but by the time they needed to reinstall (5 and a half years later) the disk was scratched from sitting at the bottom of the drawer - anyone else remember the way CDs were marketed as indestructible in the eighties?

Buying the Queen size bed on the web was easy.

Getting it home in our tiny car was a test. Having eventually crammed the frame in and shut the doors, we strapped the queen-size mattress to the roof with some twine pushed through the open windows and drove off, waving merrily to the police parked outside the neghbouring house.

We made it home without incident, and I spent the rest of the evening assembling the thing, then went and slept on the floor while Claire enjoyed her big, comfy new queen-sized bed.

Our quiz team had a bit of a strange get together on the Sunday. Instead of heading to the pub to win prizes and drink hot chocolate, we took the ferry over the bay to Rangitoto island, a large, almost symetrical shallow-coned volcano visible from all over Auckland. It was a fine day and we all climbed to the summit and enjoyed our sandwiches and spectacular views of Auckland Harbour and Devonport peninsula in the sunshine. Apparently the island is only 600 years old. When the first europeans arrived, it was bare rock, but in the last 300 years it's been covered by Pohutukawa, and now much of it is quite lush, but with random stretches of contrasting bare volcanic rock.

A full-on weekend. Friday night there's a gig in Aotea square - Concord Dawn, Pitch Black and other kiwi acts mashing it up. I met Mark (www.makemarksmovie.com) there, and we went on to see Grandmaster Flash and Junior Sanchez at the St James across Queen Street. We're showing our age, as the closest we came to class A's was a bit of spliff and some Red Bull. Sanchez was fucking top though - he segued effortlessly from Blur to Cobain to White Stripes, all the while keeping it hard, wet and funky. Sunday was top - went with Claire and Bas to see Kombi Nation at the Devonport Cinema which is open for 3 weekends to raise funds to reopen for real (apparently it's the oldest purpose-built cinema in the Southern hemisphere). Poor Jo was hitting the books, but Bas figured it was the least he could do to keep out of her hair and join us on the beach for fish and chips, cold Bravara and people-watching...

I had a job interview on Monday. I Want to gain some C# skills, as my current VB3 with some SQL7 role is hardly cutting edge. I'd already done the hour-long 'phone chat with HR to establish that within 6 months I'd be getting work on C# pojects if offered the job.

So I turn up at the swanky offices on K-Road (Auckland's Soho, or Kings Cross if you will...) and Mat keeps me waiting. Shiny-foreheaded chap who's obviously very happy as an IT manager for a logistics company. Then we get a conference room, and he opens by double-checking that I'm not hoping to be cross-trained into .NET technologies.

-"Actually, that's my only reason for wanting to change jobs, as I made clear to the agent and to your HR interviewer"

-"well, I might be able to say you would be getting .NET work within 3 years"

-"my career to date is 6 years, I'm not waiting till 2008 to use 2002 technology".

and we shook hands and that was that.

Bas and Jo, our best mates here (Bas works with me) have been burgled for the 2nd time in a few months. The 1st time, Jo's family-heirloom jewelry was taken. This time, souvenirs from Indonesia that Bas' parents brought from the Netherlands at christmas. It's made me realise we should have our documents, laptop, and Claire's jewelry better secured.

Lawrence, our quiz-team captain, Quaker-attender, engineer and anti-landmine activist, lent us a bed when we first moved to our unfurnished flat - and now his family need it back, so we've bought a 2nd hand one on the web.

There's no reason to be nervous, but somehow, until my passport with the Aussie stamp in it is in my hand, I'm still expecting it to be lost in the post or declared invalid or stolen.... The celebrations happen when I have it in my hands, and not a minute before.

Yeah, really tired. Our Aussie visas have come through. We've sent our passports off to the UK to have them stamped - have to see how that goes, and whether we get them safely back in the post afterwards.

I've got one incredibly persistent recruitment guy, a Canadian called Derek, stalking me at the moment. My instincts say I should ignore him until he goes away, but the fact is he comes up with some pretty interesting work, so I've let him talk me into an interview on Monday. The company is a run-of the mill shipping/intermodal firm, but the project they've got lined up is cutting edge.... Wait and see I guess, and try to sell myself at the interview.

Work had some comic moments this week. our biggest client produced their millionth Contract. Contract ID is in the DB as an integer (so it's OK to 9 and a bit digits).... but it's being shoe-horned into a char(6) all over the fucking shop. It's been like Y2K but without the bonus and the party afterwards.

Got a big night lined up next Friday - Grandmaster flash plus a load of big names from less antediluvian US and UK acts are playing the St James in town, and I've got a ticket to go with Mark (www.makemarksmovie.com mark), and I've even found a retro T-shirt with a lambretta on the front for the event.

I had a small verucca on the 2nd toe of my right foot. The nurse who tried to burn it off with liquid nitrogen fucked it up. From being no problem, it's become a 2 week saga of foot-pain, difficulty walking, back-pain, antibiotics and nurofen. It's made me realise how tiny a thing it takes to reduce you to an invalid state. My morning shower is usually a high point of the day. Now Im hopping around on my left foot, trying to keep the right foot dry by sticking it out under the shower curtain then I drop the shampoo and realise I can't kneel down to pick it up without going tit-over-arse. On the upside, getting through the week on a cocktail of coffee, nurofen, Corona, cannabis and antibiotics comes highly recommended.

So I'm still getting my head round XML and ANT. It's a harsh learning curve frankly.

Still doing some legacy VB3 work which is not helping my motivation - in fact, it's causing me to scan the jobsites.

Visited Mike in hospital and gave him Iain Banks's latest to relieve the wardboredom - he looks great for a guy who's just broken a bunch of ribs, chipped his spine, smashed his hip, broken his leg, broken his wrist and arm, and recovered from a severe haematoma. He was sitting up in bed and making jokes...Lucky escape from a 6 meter fall.

We didn't win the pub quiz this week, so we're retiring hurt for a few weeks to lick our wounds and learn lots of nerdy facts.. We'll be back in the Autumn with the full force of the United team, and we will prevail.

I'd been waiting for a direct invite to Mark's (www.makemarksmovie.com) wednesday evening DVD sessions for a few weeks - and this week we were asked to attend.... We checked out his massive pad by the bridge (where he lives for a song coz it's due for demolition the lucky git) and watched "Coffee and Cigarettes" which gets 3 thumbs up.

Claire's booked on a C# course next week, so we're putting together a wee demo app that consumes an XML web-service. I feel like I've missed the boat on this technology and will never get past VB at this point. She's picking it up fast though, and I'm at the limit of my dimly remembered MCSD knowledge already.

At work the leap to working with Java is just too great. Someone would have to be there to mentor me for a few weeks, and the resource just isn't there - so I've got to sit next to a team using Java while I maintain VB3 code - this ain't gonna last.

Just come back from the monthly Stanley Bay Bowls Club quiz. We won. Devonport food and wine festival tomorrow - much alcohol will be consumed. Fuck it, I'm tired, it's been a long week, I'm bored with the minus signs all over my demo forex-trading app-window, the cat we adopted won't stop miaowing....The kiwi is angry.

I've been downunder a year and a week.

It's still a shocker in terms of the size of the job market: A lot of the smaller niches in IT are quite literally occupied by a monopoly or duopoly, and the people with a given skillset can be counted on your fingers. This has one positive effect: Lots of the people in any given field are at the top of their field in New Zealand.

So my 2nd Southern Autumn is just around the corner. It was an unexpectedly busy week - replaced the window in my bathroom that we broke a few weeks back trying to get some air into the place, repositioned my wireless router and telephone, stuck up a rack in the kitchen for our cooking utensils.... Fuck, it's a rock and roll lifestyle.

Now recovered from the excesses of the Big Day Out (Chemicals, Kid 606 et al) Claire and I headed for the Mission Bay Jazz'n'Blues festival on Saturday.

Its a sunny Tuesday in my cube. The airconditioning is kicking in, and the developers have some loungecore on their ipods and headphones plugged into the company MP3-pool. I've got Noir Desir cranked up while I throw my creative powers at another set of SQL/Crystal reports.

My line manager fell of his roof at the weekend, injuring himself pretty horrifically - it's a 2 storey house and he bounced down some steep steps after the initial impact. Luckily (luckily?) his head landed on a planter full of succulents.

The company sent flowers.

We've heard from Adelaide - they have the last documents they need to make their decision - so we should know if we're getting the permanent residence stamp within a few days now.

The MSN messenger (that ansible of the noughties!) was down this afternoon, and the developers were getting jittery. I've finished re-reading Coupland's Gen-X. It's improved, I feel, rather than lost relevance. Finishing that and starting Alice Walker's "Color Purple" though....Stepping out of a rally-car into a Daimler.

I'm staying late to assist in a data upgrade this evening, then heading straight to my regular Tuesday pub-quiz. The captain's back (he'd deny it, but Lawrence is our cap'n), and team Erasmus is looking to reclaim first place from all pretenders.

We've been adopted by a lazy grey cat. It's loud and friendly and we feed it weird brown chunks from a cardboard box with a picture of a blonde lady french kissing her persian kitty on the front. It's not getting in the house because it moults all the time. I'm engaged in a personal quest to make the SQL I write the most boring SQL ever written - and there's some boring stuff out there.

My house has a wireless network, and I have a laptop. On sunny days, I walk into the garden to browse the web, realise I can't see the screen with all that glare, and get a book instead.

Mozilla's forecastfox plugin has a phrase I've not seen before to describe tomorrow's weather:- "scattered thunderstorms". I see George Bush has announced he intends to use diplomacy to persuade the remaining recalcitrant Axis Of Evil club (Iran, North Korea....errr...) to be nice. Helicopters on the roofs of the green zone in Baghdad by the autumn?

Decided to re-read Coupland's Generation X. Didn't like it much at the time, and wondered what all the fuss was about. I think I'll like it better this time round.

As usual everything's up in the air - I'm waiting on the Australian authorities to OK my Permanent residence visa, I've got a couple of intriguing semi-offers of work in London, and Claire's and my lives in Auckland might become academic if our Sterling debts overwhelm our kiwi dollar income shortly.

I live on the other side of the world, and I'm pissed off. My ex-PM's son got caught plotting a coup, and was let off with a wee fine. Here in Kiwiland as I wait for the bus in the morning I watch streams of people drive past me, each one alone in their SUV or car. For news and current affairs here I can check a Murdoch paper or an INM/O'Reilly paper. I'm sure I used to be politically centre-left or even centre. Somehow, the world has shifted around me and I inhabit the wild fringes populated by those strange revenants who see a utility in increasing marginal tax rates or mechanisms to channel state finance towards educating and safeguarding the health of the next generation even when their parents are poor; and those who think "free trade" means subsidising rich-country farmers is immoral and should be swiftly punished by the WTO..... Anyway, this is my first rant as Angry Kiwi- expect things to get more vitriolic as I give myself a Dilbert-Style "stealth raise" by blogging away furiously on my /. journal from my desk instead of writing code.

I mean, fuck, I'm angry. I'm angry I can't visit big swathes of the world because I've got white skin and Dubya, fucktard that he is, has managed to steer a foreign policy course that's already got the population of the anglosphere hated by half the Middle East and many others. I'm angry that enlightenment values are being snuffed out by people who believe that some ancient religious texts of certain middle-eastern tribes are word-for-word instruction manuals for how to live your life. I'm angry with political correctness - I want social democracy. You remember, that weird old idea where the state defends people's rights and prevents them from falling too low in exchange for a chunk of everyone's income? Quaint, I know. In short, I'm angry that the few remaining bastions of common-sense in the world are under remorseless attack, and it's time to hit back in every way we can. Right now. I hate superstition and cant. I hate those who want to rid the world of the structures in place to prevent the wielding of naked power and aggression. I hate the way Windows XP snuffs out my Mozilla browser despite endless careful installs. More anger tomorrow - off to sharpen my beak.

Everybody's online, lookin good...