My first Jack O Lantern.

Not a common site in New Zealand I imagine, but we’ve had this huge pumpkin thing kicking around our house for a while. Today Ashleigh and I decided to have a go at making a Jack’o'lantern.

Good fun !!!

I’ve started tramping this year.

Here is the photos of one adventure, where I walked south from Paeroa by myself.

Here  is another where I walked up Mount Pirongia with Ashleigh

The story for this weekend:
Well 3 hours to Hurunui hut. I departed the carpark at 10 arrived at the hut at 1:16 (wow … this gps tracking makes telling stories a bit easier )
Stopped for a bite. Met two hunters that were well set up in the hut. Carried on to my planned destination Mangamuka Hut.
Well the rain got harder, and my fitness started to fade, so at 2:40pm I turned to head back to Hurunui hut. By the time I got back to the hut the rain had eased, and I was on my second wind, so rather than share a hut I decided to walk out for a hot shower and a cold beer
Made it to the road at 6:25pm which I was very pleased to see as the light was start to dramatically fade under the bush canopy.
Another 30 minutes of road walking put me back at my car at 6:49pm
9 hours; 1 hour 20 minutes of stop time, 23.95 kms.

Quite sore today
This was a big day for me 9 hours I was at the far end of my fitness level; I’d just started to feel a little nauseas, and the slightest change in elevation (up or down) meant I had to stop for 20 seconds or so to let my legs recover
Paul.

If you have Garmin Basecamp or Garmin Mapsource you should be able to view this gpx file

Here’s one for the web developers of the world.
Google plus one went live today, so I chucked together a couple of simple functions, to include in your WordPress functions.php theme file.

function ne_addGooglePLusOneHeader() {
    echo "<script type=\"text/javascript\" src=\"http://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js\"></script>\n";
}    

add_action('wp_head', 'ne_addGooglePLusOneHeader');

function ne_show_googleplusone_button {
    // display Google plus one (+1) at the bottom of the_content()
    global $wp_query;

    //set the size of the button: small, medium, standard, tall
    // (more info here: http://code.google.com/apis/+1button/#script-parameters)
    $size = "medium";

    $postUrl = get_permalink($wp_query->post->ID);
    $plusOneButton = "<g:plusone size=\"$size\" count=\"true\" href=\"$postUrl\"></g:plusone>\n";
    return $content.$plusOneButton;

}

add_filter('the_content', 'ne_show_googleplusone_button');

There has been this thing on my mind for a while. It’s based on the fact that I’m big on promoting website and whatnot, maybe even my own website .. the thing is, advertising has been getting to me, and not in the normal way.

You’ll notice there is no advertising on this site, no google ads not a stitch! I have played with it in the passed, tried the google ads and earned my $0.00000006c of advertising revenue, and y’know what .. it’s not worth it. There are better things I could be doing with the website real estate ; or at least I feel like I’m “making a stand” or been called to some higher calling of blogging by not displaying adverts.

Nah that’s rubbish, I just don’t fancy it, and the amount that I get in return is just not worth it.

But here’s the kicker; it seems there is a correlation between the success of a website and the amount of adverts displayed.

Do you rate the success of a website based on the number of eye popping website graffiti bollocks? If I plaster crap all over my blog will I somehow looks more “real”? and if this is so, hasn’t advertising and website come far? it’s depressing to think that what I suspect might be true.

Now this is a story all about how my life got tipped turned upside down ….

Nah not really, it more of a “don’t assume you get things right, don’t even assume others get things right, don’t even assume anything”

So this week I figured it’s about time my new company ( www.netenterprises.co.nz ) .. which actually at this stage means me , should get out on the sales trail; I need to drum up some future work. I’ve got a bit going on at the moment, and have some fairly solid future prospects, but I really want to push some growth. I haven’t taken any drawings yet (taken money out), instead hoping to burn through some money to encourage growth.

Business cards .. that’s what I need.

So I bust out the old adobe products and give the old design muscle a bit of a work out. Not too hard really, I’ve got a fairly solid idea of what I want; I have documented all the CMYK colours that I have used so far, and have a sweet vector version of my “building” … so really this is just going to be a shuffle of content to fit on a business card.

Anyway, you can see the result, I’m fairly happy so off to the printers I send them.

Michael Emett and friends at nz.printing.com are more than happy to help me out. They did my cards for netcore.co.nz and I was really happy with those, so it wasn’t even a choice for me, of course I was going to use nz.printing.com. So a few emails back and forth, and a payment, and I’m set (can you tell where this story is going?)

Yep .. you guessed it !!!@@#$!

I proof read that bad boy a million times. I printed it out and sat the thing on my kitchen table for others to read. I read each and every word individually to ensure correctness …..

Just so you know, my P.O. Box number is 221. If you are the New Zealand Army and get mail addressed to me (the NZ Army P.O. Box is 212) can you please forward it to me.

So 1000 cards will probably go in the fire, along with the money I spent to get them .. oh well it’s only money

I might wait until next month to get replacements; give myself a bit of time to forget the pain

It seems the international community is starting to notice some things in the NZ internet space. This recent story on El reg “Nz boffins anchor new submarine cable”

New Zealand’s new US$400m submarine communications cable project, Pacific Fibre, has signed Reannz (Research & Education Advanced Network NZ) as its first customer.

The Pacific Fibre undersea cable system will connect Australia to the United States with two fibre optic cables via New Zealand and should bring more competitive pricing to the international transmission market – it will go head-to-head with the incumbent Southern Cross Cable network.

This pleases me … Me and the internet we’re like this (*crosses fingers*) 

So to see my precious (nah, I don’t really call it that ) possibly developing is great news. There is a *thing* coming together in NZ with fibre to the home, pacific fibre !! I’m excited!

Yep it’s the important issues I consider !!!

Actually this is a somewhat important topic in New Zealand really; the laws surrounding anti-piracy and what-not in NZ. Today the NZ Herald published a story about libraries having to possibly remove all internet access.

It’s what I have been trying to explain to people all along; there is no burden of proof, and it will affect small business in NZ.  Possibly my message hasn’t been getting through because I engage the “rant” mode when I talking; which is probably not conducive to listening to what I have to say  

Now I’m no saint I’ll give you that, but, and here’s my thing, if I see value then I don’t mind paying .. no problem in fact, I’ll pay!

Computer games for instance; I spend money, because I see value in what I’m buying, just take a look at my Steam account, see .. I spend money!  But if there is no value, I refuse to pay .. sky tv for many years took money from me, all the while slowly but surely, increasing the amount of advertising I had to sit through, the value diminished to where I could no longer stand giving them any money. Same deal with Vodafone. I was a Vodafone customer for near on a trillion years, but have just recently switch to 2degrees; better value

The real cure to this needs to be a better thought out way of selling movies, tv shows, and all this pirate nonsense. Better value !! that’s what I want.

It’s all related I tell ya . … fibre in our country could be an enabler to a fix for this problem. We are meant to be embracing technology, not hindering it. The current climate is heading towards stifling technology advancement;

I’ve long been a fan of fast internet. When I built my country home 8 years ago I paid an extra $5000 to get a huge pole installed, so I could get wireless delivered (17kms line of site). At the time this was pretty cutting edge stuff, and expensive !!! but everything in my house uses the internet; my TV (TiVo) my phones (slingshot voip, and world xchange voip) my cell phones (3 android phones in the house) plus my idle iPad.

Content, my kingdom for content

I’ve also been pretty good friends with the folks (or at least one of them) at Velocity Networks, so I’ve had my unfair share of information from network providers. Content is king !

No body wants a fast connection, just so they can say they have a fast connection (well maybe I do ) but really we want content don’t we? TV on-demand, game servers, hosted movies, content .. content .. content! but what content?

However the NZ government seems to be working against us with an ill-informed anti-piracy law that removes any burden of proof; we’re all just scared out of our wits to share anything in case we get the book thrown at us.

So how is ultrafast broadband supposed to succeed ?

More game servers? roll on Duke Nukem forever !!!!

Well it seems maybe the honeymoon is over?

I bought this thing late last year, as I was sick of carting around my heavy laptop.  I figured the “real” use of my laptop was basically access to email, contact, and calendars while I’m mooching about Hamilton. I could of course do this all with my phone, but somehow the iPad just seemed better.

Of course I’m a gadget freak too, so that had something to do with buying this thing

(more…)

So todays project was shorten my URLs

Seems simple enough, I’ve been using bit.ly for a while mainly to ease my tweetdeck usage But last night I thought “myself” I thought “you should do your own URL shortening”

I’ve seen “that guy” ben do it ( http://www.ben.geek.nz/ ).. can’t be that hard

So some googling around to what my options are turns out I need that sweet short domain name.

So I got nznet.info, take a look, register and start tracking your links …. like a boss!

There is some stuff I don’t do which maybe I should ? bad word filtering etc? not sure .. I’ll think about that. If it turns into a spam fest then I will make available to registered users only.