So this is what the gates look like now (click to embiggen):



Even stood back up:


Someone appears to have smashed through them, gone for a spin around the gardens and smashed out through them again. Between about 5pm and 12:30am. You'd think somebody would have seen something...

May or not have been the people in the building who triggered the 12:30 alarm, whom B as first on the scene called the police for because he heard breakage, who somehow fled out the back over a couple of fences and who the police dog lost track of in the park over that way.

Who may or may not have been the same people who came around (or from) the back while B and I were inside checking the lower floor, smashed a back window before we could get out to approach them or call M around from the front then fled down the drive ahead of M, getting caught in that chain and doing this


before making good their escape down Balgay. (We called the police again but [shrug]). Two guys - white dress shirts, dress pants according to M.

~~~
So I'm moving up the schedule, I'll be down at the Hall (this) afternoon at the least cutting up some more braces and billboards to secure ways into (and equally importantly out of) the building. I will be grateful of any assistance that can be supplied.

(It will be the afternoon because it is currently 3:45am and I haven't been to bed yet.)

I will be continuing this through the week as time / assistance allows. Particularly Wednesday afternoon since I have to be on site anyway.

Back in 2009 I posted about an alternative approach to investing in a business. Seems we have a recently minted venture capital company in NZ taking this approach.

Hence Venture Solutions ... and its process which is very much built around collaboration with the inventor, without VSL owning any of the project’s intellectual property.

What VSL does provide though is, following a market validation that a pain point exists for the proposed product, finance to get a product to market in return for a cut in its retail price (this will and does vary from product to product but is around 15 – 25%). The inventor retains all the I.P.

* although actually we updated so C could have more data before going over cap.

After a few technical glitches and two visits by a slightly frustrated technician can haz TelstraClear Warpspeed internet connection (100Mb/10Mb).
Of course since it's feeding into a router which can at best handle 100Mb wired and less by wireless we're not going to get the full benefit of that, but still an advance on 15/2 and I might look at upgrading the router next time I have a good month.

... of course the main issues with speed on this system remain software related - I don't know if it's windows, the browsers of the firewall/virus checker but my initial tabs are all really slow to load when I open a browser.

So much has happened this week especially in the past few days.. I need to write it down while much of it is still fresh even though my brain is shying away from the task.
First let it be noted that I did a full (for me) week of work - so fitting in four hours a day on average. I also had parental units visit multiple times during the week. #AH alarm times are to the nearest half hour, take from 30-90 minutes to resolve and this usually results in a justified late rising the next day although it is worth noting I haven't had so many un-justified late risings recently.

( Monday )

( Tuesday )

( Wednesday )

( Thursday )

( Friday )

( Saturday at Antonio Hall (long) )

( Sunday (today) )

it's the times when I don't get back to sleep for 2+ hours after getting home again that are a drag.

Last nights "visitors" must have tripped the alarm as they were leaving at 2am, because they had certainly taken plenty of time to go through the dormitory wing investigating the cabinets presumably in search of copper pipe (of which there is of course none left). They may have have even ripped out a couple of the cabinets which were still attached to the walls - especially upstairs we're not familiar enough with the rooms but are sure the doors didn't used to be blocked from opening more than half way. Which means that although I'm currently trying not to think past Saturday that the next two operations have to be "Reset" where we put all the beds and cabinets back in their proper places and "All the holes" where we cover up as many of the windows that can be got in through as possible.

If Saturday goes well (setting precedent) we'll also be looking closely at what it will take to let the people who have been volunteering arrange some of the events they want to hold in the Hall :)

~~~
* although it is still an effort if I'm not already lying awake

Last week a new ISP appeared on the radar. Fyx offered flat-rate broadband and a "global mode" which would mitigate some of the geolocking preventing kiwis from viewing certain content over the internet (even if prepared to pay for it).

Not entirely surprisingly global mode has already been pulled for the meantime. Fyx has dropped their prices and offered refunds in compensation.

I was less interested in global mode than in how the pricing stacked up against the capped plans more generally on offer. Having an unexpectedly free evening I've done some spreadsheeting.

It's difficult to exactly compare like with like - every company has a slightly different take. But what I'm looking at here are phone+broadband packages with the phone cost (typically about $40) stripped out because although Fyx don't provide a phone service their baseline service does require you to have a copper landline with another provider. I may do the naked broadband comparisons in another sheet at some point. I've included TelstraClear's fibre options although it's not really an apple/apple comparison. I've charted Gb used (on the x axis) vs Cost ($ on the y axis) up to 100Gb.



Conclusions? Slingshot is generally the cheapest option followed by Fyx, although at the very top of the range (100Gb) Fyx is overtaken (undertaken?) by Snap and Telecom is closing fast. Although both those providers have steps coming up that won't cause them to lose much ground. At the slightly more expensive rates Fyx initially offered (with global mode enabled) I don't know that it would have beaten Slingshot at any point. OTOH it's not generally considered hard to beat Slingshot on service... which beings us to it being important to bear in mind that this is purely a $/Gb comparison, it doesn't take into account speed (promised or actual) or anything else.

This is of course purely academic as I'm not considering switching away from my fibre connection - almost but not quite the most expensive option.

Thanks to everyone who turned up we cleared all the areas planned and some more besides. If anyone was wondering yes we were in the building during that little shake, but it was all noise no force.

Now hoping for fine weather next Saturday for the photographers. Would be good to have a few more people of the list to help with that, especially people who can do mornings :)

Last night had an alarm shortly after one dealing with which kept us there until about 3am - and I then woke up shortly after 7. So I'm just going to go and have a little nap now.

I think I dreamt an entire zombie movie last night, and possibly snippets of a sequel. I may be in a bit of a zombie state myself after only 5-6 hours sleep (but relatively uninterrupted), but I was awake and have things to do.

Conveniently this meant I was out of bed for a 6:50am AH (false) alarm, and it fortunately occurred after my shower and just before I was about to put a pot of porridge on the stove.

Things to do includes re-doing a bunch of stuff from yesterday having accidentally found and triggered an aggravatingly destructive bug in another bit of the code from what I was altering/testing, right at the end of the day. (Normally that combination of parameters an script calls could not occur... at least I now know that bug exists #silverlining ). Fortunately - nightly backups, only a day of data and changes on the server lost.

I was in a somewhat work-zombified state at that stage too, Tuesday was a bit of a struggle - may have overdone it on Monday when I somehow managed 7 hours billable plus a couple of hours at the hall plus sundry other stuff.

OK most people have said Saturday is best for them so Saturday afternoon (from 1pm) it is. The aim of this working bee is to clear glass from the areas that photographers and models will be using the following weekend. I don't have a final list yet but this will include:
- the Reception room (aka the gold plush room)
- one or both of the charred dormitory rooms
- the upstairs passageway
- possibly the bathroom and corridor thereto next to the infirmary

If we have extra hands we will also look at securing some more of the windows. (I am hitting the photography group up for helpers.)

<< Prev || Next >>

We purchase equipment for underground travel and are allowed out the lower gates of the Dwarven city. The deep way between here and our destination is broad and easy to follow and although we cannot Wind Walk with as much speed below ground we still make far better time than we would on foot. There is little chance of being mistaken for clouds down here though.

( Orcs )
~~~
( Dwarves )
~~~
( Drow )

Next: debriefing, a bluff and summonsed to the Mage tower to solve a problem for the Paladins.

If you hadn't heard already, LJ is giving the Scrapbook a long needed makeover. (I don't think it's changed significantly in the 10ish years I've been using it). Unfortunately in the process they are doing away with (reverse order of importance to me)
- the ability to have an image in multiple galleries
- I'm not clear on sub-galleries but the screenshots aren't promising
- TAGS, which are not being preserved in any form

In my case this last means hours of manually entered naming information simply evaporating. (The template I was using already seems to have broken somewhat - although that could have happened ages ago. I don't go in there very much myself any more.)

So what can you do to save your information in some form, no matter how obtuse?

a) Go to the Scrapbook export page which will give you an xml file containing your gallery structure and thus what images are in each gallery including tag galleries*. It also gives you caption and description data for each image and the current url for each image - which will be redirected to the new location of the image after the change.
* LJ creates a gallery for each tag and then associates images to that gallery rather than associating tags to images. Back-asswards but I can sort of see the logic so maybe it's just half-pie.

Do this now. Once you have that information it may later be possible to parse the xml and download the images to your computer while associating the tags with the images in a human-readable way. Which is to say I'm about a third of the way through a script to do exactly that.


b) you can use the Semagic client for LJ to sync your Scrapbook galleries with a directory on your computer. I did this yesterday. Semagic creates a copy of the file in every gallery it is associated with - so my 2Gb of files online grew to 3.75 GB locally (this took some time to download). Do this by going

Journal (menu) > Pictures > Open LiveJournal Scrapbook , _Export_ (link)

Semagic does not appear to retain caption/description information nor is their any way of figuring out which set an image was in originally except by searching for all instances of the filename in the archive. Problem - this is the original filename as uploaded - which doesn't have to be unique. I don't know what semagic does if two files with the same filename end up in a tag gallery.

- I know I have multiple files with the same filename from times when my old camera reset itself or clocked. Whether any are uploaded / same-tagged I have no idea.

My own script is probably also going to download an instance of the file into every gallery it is associated with just in case, and will handle identical filenames somehow.

You can also use Semagic to backup your LJ entries locally - as an alternative to LJArchive. The advantage over LJ Archive is that it will also make local copies of images linked from your entries, which prevents them being lost into the ocean of dead links.


c) Chebe has some instructions for using wget to get your scrapbook images but I couldn't make them work - I would have thought just mirroring the galleries with wget would have given you a locally viewable copy with all the tags etc as they are displayed in Scrapbook galleries. That's what I'm aiming to do with my script.

Unfortunately writing the captions and tags into the file metadata with a script is still beyond my abilities :(

I am at an age where I should be thinking about health insurance and research has to start somewhere. In the past few weeks I have accepted visits from cold-calling health-insurance "advisers". I use the inverted commas because they are paid by commission from the insurance companies when the sell a policy ad this automatically makes their advice a little tainted regardless of how "registered" they are.

( Initial questions )
~~~
( other options )
~~~
( Trauma cover )
~~~
( Another question )
~~~
( In conclusion )

Who wants one? Usual preferences apply.

And the people they have assigned to repair earthquake damage here.

Seems to have been a shorter version of the "full assessment" which was done a while ago. Now that they've seen what needs to be done for themselves they will be sorting out quotes.

Expect to hear back in "about 8 weeks, could be longer".

And I need to go track down a source of dry-erase paint for the potential painting-of-the-office with [plots].

That's quite a cute number.

Numerous bits of was-used-to-smash-something debris extracted from units.
Several more empty buckets suitable for collecting glass located
1 rubbish bag -filled- from along the front fence
4 buckets of recycling collected (mostly) from along the front fence
2 more fallen branches relocated to the pile
1 chapel swept out (cough, hack), not including between the pews which will require quite a bit of shifting, not including the side rooms @todo

Can haz nap nao?