Author Archive

Infratil and NZ Bus – pay up.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:46 am, October 14th, 2009 - 15 comments

Day 7 of the bus strike by Infratil The idiotic employers at NZ Bus owned by Infratil have dragged their lockout into a 7th day of disrupting Auckland’s commuters. Yesterday they repackaged some of their old proposals and tried to make it look like something new. What the grasping employers want is for the drivers […]

Infratil are pissing into the wind

Written By: lprent - Date published: 4:58 pm, October 13th, 2009 - 7 comments

Day 6 of Infratil’s strike Brian Rudman had a column yesterday that clearly articulated how Aucklanders view the bus strike by Infratil management at NZ Bus. Only a few days ago, my bus had to take an unscheduled stop outside the public toilets in Victoria Park. The driver locked his money box then made the […]

Infratil / NZ Bus striking for more profits

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:28 am, October 8th, 2009 - 7 comments

Well the intransigent owners and managers of Infratil / NZ Bus finally went on strike this morning in their quest for higher profits. They locked out the bus drivers for threatening to abide by their contract. This is causing widespread chaos amongst other businesses as their employees are unable to get to work. We just dispatched […]

Outage

Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:00 pm, September 21st, 2009 - 6 comments

The outage earlier this evening was due to the hosting company taking the server down.. We will be rebooting the host machine to update its kernel and apply some other fixes. The reboot will occur at approx 2200 PT (10pm Pacific time) on Sunday September 20th. Your server should be down for 5-10 minutes, we […]

CCD Myth: The planets are warming

Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:45 am, September 20th, 2009 - 8 comments

We haven’t seen much of this myth in NZ. However it shows some good examples of selective reading of news articles and papers by CCD’s in support of the “Martians drive hummers” line. Thanks to Andrei for reminding me why videos like this have to be made. You have to read the whole article or […]

CCD Myth: 1998 and all that

Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:53 am, September 19th, 2009 - 24 comments

If you are in love with the concept that 1998 was the warmest year on record (wrong by the way), don’t watch this. This runs through exactly why you don’t know what you’re talking about. Check out this

Examining the scientific consensus on climate change

Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:30 am, September 13th, 2009 - 87 comments

There was an interesting preview paper published back in January by by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman. It sheds light on how the scientists who work in the field view the probability of climate change happening. It is pretty clear from the results that those closest to the data and who know the factors […]

Those pesky boundaries for Auckland

Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:23 pm, September 12th, 2009 - 31 comments

There are a couple of things that I hadn’t realised about the rather strange changes to the Auckland super-city boundaries. They are just weird and show a strange idea of what Auckland. About 50% of Auckland’s water comes from the Hunua’s. Surely the provision of fresh water is a “core service” of local bodies. Sure […]

Jim Anderton on organisation

Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:24 pm, September 11th, 2009 - 20 comments

The most interesting feature of the Labour conference so far has been from Jim Anderton. It looks like the Progressives are now able to have dual membership with Labour. However he also talking about better organisation of the party towards campaign planning. Some of his ideas are a bit dated (well at least to me). […]

Labour conference bits and pieces

Written By: lprent - Date published: 1:15 pm, September 10th, 2009 - 24 comments

The Labour party conference is on in Rotorua this weekend, so I’ll be heading there Friday morning. If the writers and readers want to catch up then I’ll generally be around the Mt Albert delegation – they can direct you towards my grey hairs. I’m particularly interested in people who think that they can write […]

Shock, Horror – Infratil managers strike for more pay!

Written By: lprent - Date published: 8:12 am, September 8th, 2009 - 7 comments

Yesterday Infratil got their NZ Bus hand-puppets to announce that they will be going on strike. On Wednesday, if the bus-drivers refuse to donate their time freely to increase Infratil returns to investors, the company will remove bus-services from the commuters of Auckland. If the reasonable attempts of the bus drivers to increase their wages […]

Sohole.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 2:24 pm, September 6th, 2009 - 8 comments

In Ponsonby there is a bloody great big hole which is all that remains of the unlamented DYC Vinegar factory. It has been affording the locals some amusement between bouts in hearings. The site was to be a $250 million mall. The hole was dug last year. However it stopped abruptly when the development group […]

The song of the sewer

Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:20 pm, September 5th, 2009 - 17 comments

An old favourite came around on the playlist. It sounded like the ostriches that occupy the sewer and appear here for our entertainment… So I tracked down a live performance by Leonard Cohen. The Man from Uncle version with the studio soundtrack is pretty funny as well. Lyrics over the page… Everybody knows that the […]

Politically illiterate authoritarian git

Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:00 am, September 3rd, 2009 - 71 comments

There are an interesting couple of posts over at Red Alert about an editorial in the Dominion Post yesterday. Grant Robertson describes it as a bitter diatribe. Trevor Mallard thinks it is a bit over the top. I think that the editor who wrote it is an authoritarian git who really needs to consider why […]

More votes than voters

Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:00 am, September 2nd, 2009 - 12 comments

The Economist has an article on the recent election in New Zealand’s current region of conflict – Afghanistan. The title of the article says it all really, so that is the title of the post. But here are a selection of depressing quotes from the article to make people realize why this is currently a […]

Stop pandering to the modern flat earthers

Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:00 pm, September 1st, 2009 - 62 comments

ACT as part of its coalition agreement, and probably as a result of their funders conditions, forced a review of the Emissions Trading Scheme last year. The review has concluded that the science is valid and chosen to go with the IPCC 4th report as a basis. This is of course extremely conservative and doesn’t […]

Stupi-duty and Wisharts works of political fiction

Written By: lprent - Date published: 2:00 pm, August 19th, 2009 - 34 comments

Open Parachute has a post Evidence, not lawyers about that well-known writer of political fiction, Ian Wishart, issuing a press release saying that he is preparing to sue the Chris Barton at the NZ Herald and Gareth Renowden at Hot-Topic. As Open Parachute says The offensive sentence? ‘Only this week breakfast TV host Paul Henry flirted […]

Not yours to sell

Written By: lprent - Date published: 6:46 pm, August 16th, 2009 - 28 comments

This video from Phil Twyford, Labour’s spokesperson on the campaign to make sure that Rodney Hide is prevented from buggering Auckland by selling critical assets to his mates in the business community so they can raise prices, diminish maintenance, stop capacity building, and make more profits for themselves. Given the history of natural monopoly privatizations […]

Wordcamp

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:29 am, August 8th, 2009 - 3 comments

If you’re interested in the software that runs this site and many others, there is a wordcamp in Wellington this weekend about the open-source wonder WordPress. WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core […]

Stick to Acting

Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:47 pm, August 7th, 2009 - 20 comments

John explains how what he said was taken out of context, and he outlines his views on climate change.

John Key ‘may’ be able to understand it?

Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:00 am, August 6th, 2009 - 11 comments

John Key has recently acted like a jerk to a young mother worried about what climate change is going to mean for her future and that of her child. Essentially he said that she should stick to what she knew. Bearing in mind the complete lack of understanding that both John Key and his NACT […]

Change to policy – Privacy Consent

Written By: lprent - Date published: 3:41 pm, July 29th, 2009 - 26 comments

This has been added to the policy because as Lew points out there appear to be morons in government, blogs, and in journalism who appear to think that by speaking out on a blog about politics implies that you lose all expectation of protections on privacy. I’d suggest that all blogs insert this or something […]

Nick Smith lying with numbers.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 11:55 am, July 29th, 2009 - 12 comments

Nick Smith is the front-man for this government on climate change, and it appears that he knows absolutely nothing about the numbers. The ones he has been using are not related to his claims. It is puzzling because he was an engineer who are usually accurate users of numbers. It is more likely he is […]

A little test

Written By: lprent - Date published: 5:43 pm, July 7th, 2009 - 20 comments

After a remark by all-your-base the other day, I’m testing how good Akismet (the WordPress anti-spambot) is. I’ve removed the need for entering a captcha for registered and logged-in users. That is a reasonable compromise for a test as the registration is protected with a captcha. If anything manages to get through it is (based […]

Climate change, passing the pain.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 10:15 am, July 6th, 2009 - 22 comments

The US has finally managed to pass a bill through the house of representatives dealing with climate change (sort of). It is laden with pork-barrel initiatives because the congress members realised that they could treat carbon credits as a type of free-money boondoggle. It still has to pass the senate and get approval from Obama, […]

A lecture on the WAIS

Written By: lprent - Date published: 12:00 pm, July 5th, 2009 - 12 comments

There are a few odd times that I wish I was living in Wellington instead of Auckland (not often).This is one of them. There is a lecture by one of the leading researchers looking at the geology of the West Antarctica ice sheet (WAIS) and the critical medium-term effects of climate change. Tim Naish says […]

Definitely not the sewer

Written By: lprent - Date published: 5:16 pm, July 1st, 2009 - 54 comments

This post by Scott Yorke over at Imperator Fish amused me. It is such an apt description of the differences between the two major political partisan blogs in New Zealand. I like to visit The Standard now and then. There’s an occasional gem to be found there, although an angry hectoring tone largely dominates. The main […]

Bluehost have been a pain, but it is all over now.

Written By: lprent - Date published: 4:59 am, June 30th, 2009 - 34 comments

Ok. The new server is up and running after a few painful days with the system being suspended, and then after moving it to a backup and having a partition run out of space (yesterdays problem). The ostensible reason that Bluehost were suspending my account was because the processing usage on their CPU’s was exceeding […]

Server move

Written By: lprent - Date published: 9:23 am, June 24th, 2009 - 19 comments

The hosting company has moved the site to a new server last night at about 10pm. That is nice, however they didn’t bother to inform us that it was happening. Of course it was 0400 their time. I noticed it because I was working on a few bugs like the archive page at the time. […]

Server Glitch

Written By: lprent - Date published: 12:40 pm, June 19th, 2009 - 22 comments

I’m unsure exactly what the server glitch was earlier today. The hosting company had a problem with our database going ballistic, so they shut it down and suspended the account until fixed. By the look of it, I was told about 5 minutes later and a few minutes after that received an e-mail from the […]