Tsunami Alert II - 1000 Word Map

You would think when you urgently looked up NZ Civil Defence website for immediate info on the impending doom and disaster that you have heard about that you might see a map of the affected area. Or some regional local info other than addresses of council wallahs still having a lazy Sunday morning lie in.

Like the one below I have provided as a public service.



And not have to wade through a solid page of non-paragraphed text to be asked 'pretty please' do not go the beach. Or reach for an atlas to work out where the East Coast, Ahipara (Hone's) Beach and Puysegur Point are. (No, I did not have reach for Google maps).

One wonders where the millions of taxpayer wedge that are spent in Civil Defence actually go to. Can't even put a 'title' tag in the metadata on their website.

I wonder how those council wallahs will take to being phoned this morning?

A picture is worth 1000 words...

Interesting Date

In a similar vein to the run of interesting names posted by WOBH, a single interesting date.

28th February 1990

No clues will be given (well, over the next few days anyway), but readers are invited to waste their time on guesses. No prize at the end either, I will see if you've been paying attention.

Public Service Announcement:

TSUNAMI EXPECTED AT 0700+ TODAY

Harden Up!

affected staff were treated with decontamination showers by the firefighters after 5 to 10mls of the substance spilt

Decon???

Nothing but blouses these days! 10mls is two teaspoons worth. As a schoolkid I can remember chasing half a bottle around the chem lab bench with the teaspoon. And I am still here without decon.

Two bloody teaspoons worth of Hg. Harden up. Someone has to fill the bottom end of the bell curve.

Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!

Unfortunately I'm not talking of about exterminating all those scum we love to hate. Politicians.


Although all could do better with a jolt from a death ray or two.

Your chance to get the real thing for upwards of 7000 nicker.

iServe Update

Hot off the wire from the man himself.

Good afternoon,

Earlier this week a number of our customers experienced issues with some iSERVE services, particularly email and hosting console access.

First allow me to apologise to those affected.

Second, I want to give you a full run down of what happened, what we did to fix it, and what we are doing to ensure that it doesn.t happen again.

What happened?

On Monday we encountered problems with some users accessing hosting consoles and email, which we discovered stemmed from data corruption. Consequently services were offline for 2 hours on Monday evening (between 8 and 10pm) as databases were repaired.

The problem re-appeared on Tuesday morning, and we attempted (unsuccessfully) to repair the databases without further customer impact. Around midday the decision was made to take services offline and carry out a full rebuild from hardware up.

Service was then restored to all customers by 6pm, although you may have noticed email being delayed after this time as the systems worked to clear the backlog of email.

Overnight there were small outages for some services as we made further improvements to the infrastructure so as to ensure that services remain stable.

What have we learnt?

Firstly we have resolved the underlying technical problem and invested heavily in additional processing capacity

In the future we will also be providing more effective and timely communication of the issues, as we are aware that this caused frustration amongst some of our customers.

We realise that some of our customers have suffered as a result of this issue and we sincerely apologise for this.

Kind regards,

Scott M. Bartlett
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Nice. Good to see that they have learnt from this failure, unlike others in the same field.

iServe / Orcon has possibly earnt themselves a couple of brownie points. Hopefully next time regular progress reports on the website will be forthcoming.

[Updated] "finding another discrepancy"

Stop pissing about with euphemisms.

It is nothing but theft from the taxpayer.

Once again, a member of their fraternity proves that they thoroughly deserve their place in the gutter. I live in hope that one day politicians will conduct themselves with propriety and cease using my wallet as an ATM.

As if I needed that confirmed.

[Update]

Cross posted in comments at No Minister

I do not think for one minute John Boy had the balls to do the deed.

I reckon cry-baby Heatley couldn't face the thought of another teary media interview so he took the easy route.

John Boy is rushing back to Wellytown to paper over the cracks.

Update: iServe

Services have been restored for the outage we experienced this morning, caused by issues with a core database.
This fix is a workaround to restore service while we work to resolve the root cause.
We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused you and will update you as progress is made.

iServe email now appears to back online.

On 12 June 2007, Kordia, a state owned telecommunications company, purchased Orcon for NZ$24.3m, effectively nationalizing it.

Not a Telecom subsidary but a government SOE (Kordia) subsidiary. One and the same in my view.

From the threads over at Geekzone, their cloud computing and other services have gone downhill faster than Telcom's XT Network since it was taken over by Orcon. Government meddling - couldn't organise a pissup in a brewery. iServe used to be so good.

Remind me just why the government should be running a web hosting company???

Public Service Announcement: iServe down

As noted in the previous post - iServe is down. A Telecom subsidary?

Their website has the following.

We are currently experiencing issues with databases, which in turn is affecting access to the iSERVE consoles, email, database driven sites and our phone system, updates on this issue will be posted here as they are available.

9.30am: - ETA for the resolution of this issue is expected around 10am. Webmail access will be restricted untill the issue is fully resolved.

Email server access has been intermittent since yesterday morning. Email is now being actively blocked. Their website is still OK.

They should have posted progress announcement from yesterday. Hosting companies could do much better.

No 8 thinking lets NZ down

Customers on Telecom's XT network yesterday suffered another outage, with services failing for users south of Taupo shortly before 5pm

Once again, doing it on the cheap with No. 8 wire thinking that little old NZ can do it better than the big international players has let the NZ consumer down.

Vodafone, even for all the the stick it richly deserves for being an uncaring cold-hearted callous multinational player, knows how to build a reliable network. And at least it doesn't use overpaid legends in their own lunchtimes to promote donkeys. We see Hammond won't front here, but I wonder how Ms Stretton feels about being aligned to this failing product.

And just how far south will those Telecom shares go this morning?


ps I wonder if the fault has been around all day - I have customers on iServe (recently now part of Orcon) which has been experiencing email server access faults intermittently all day. Isn't Orcon part of Telecom?

Construction of Westie slum starts

about 600 of the 3000 Hobsonville residences would be "affordable"

In what used to be an upmarket area adjacent to the harbour, construction has started on the 3000 home subdivision on the old Hobsonville Air Force Base. The fog ridden views are great. Beachhaven and the Glenfield Nappy Valley sewer that is Lucas Creek. And it is on the Whenuapai flight path. Bet the current neighbours are lovin' it.

Comes with some nice names to attract the yuppies. Like Buckley Precinct and Squadron Drive. Complete with their own motorway exit to funnel the rougher Westie elements to the new estate.

60 years on, construction of the newest Orklund slum begins. Otara MkII.

Tosser Phil is back!

Nobody voted for an increase in GST

Would that be like nobody voted for an increase the top tax rate to 39%?

Her indoors has gone back to NY. Thank God for that. Funny that. Has to come all the way home to get interviewed by our fawning MSM. Must be starved of media attention over there. Oh that's right - she got put in her place as a nobody by some real media hounds. Didn't like that.

And as soon as she has gone, Fearless Fill-In Phil crawls out from under his rock to see the latest polls savaging him yet again. If it wasn't so obvious, it would be funny.

Tosser.

Phil - Where RU?

Back for two bloody days and you would think that she never left. Or was emphatically told to go at the end of 2008.

Piss off back to NY and stay there!

Phil the Caretaker, where RU? Not gutsy enough to take on the GLNZ? It is obvious from where I sit who is still running Liarbour.

Excellent news from 'Party Central' - Socialist cries foul

Auckland's mayors have decided against a plan to construct a multi-million dollar cruise ship terminal on the waterfront for the Rugby World Cup

Fantastic news from Party Central. As a multiple ratepayer in Jafaland, this is the best news that has come out of any council up there in recent times. Once again, the government of the day south of the Bombay Line has been told to smack it.

the mayors have agreed to underwrite a $40 million loan for the upgrade of Eden Park

Unfortunately the Mayors were so intent on having a last hurrah spendathon that they have committed Orklund ratepayers to underwrite the private sports club bash at that sh*thole Eden Park to the tune of $40M. Something they said would never be done. Thieving bastards. The hoary spectre of the GLNZ being in town made them do it, they'll say.

Auckland Regional Council chairman Mike Lee said the mayoral forum was a signal failure in leadership.

"And certainly in terms of the forthcoming supercity, not a super performance."

The socialist cannot help himself. Always willing to pick your pocket to put his name on another brass plaque.

Harold Potter Esq. and the Plagiarist

The theme of 'Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire', a Year of Wizardry competition, was identical to the theme of Willy the Wizard, he added. "If your child read 'Willy the Wizard' he would say to you 'that's just like Goblet of Fire,'"

Only trouble, the missive about Willy was written a decade or so earlier.

Mr Jacobs used to tell friends' children stories about a boy wizard until he was persuaded to turn the tales into a book, which he self-published. A friend of his first noticed the similarities to 'Goblet of Fire' in 2003 and Mr Jacob's estate approached Bloomsbury with the plagiarism claims the following year, but it took another five years before a lawsuit was brought against the publishing company

Must be a thing about an author flogging the works of others as their own. In top company with our esteemed plagiarists at Auckland Varsity.

Could be expensive.