Ticket ‘master’

I registered with Frontier Touring last week so I could get in early to buy tickets for Kylie Minogue and they went on ‘pre-sale’ this morning.

The whole idea of pre-sale seems a bit odd. If all you have to do is take 30 seconds to register online with Ticketmaster, and assuming most people would buy tickets online, then it hardly qualifies for a pre-sale, it’s really just ‘tickets on sale’.

I hope to hell the seats were the premium ones available because I’ll be mighty pissed if they have better ones on Monday!

Ticketmaster have developed a convoluted method of buying tickets, you get a couple of drop down boxes to select what price you will stomach (anyone remember when tickets for these events cost $40-60?) then type in some words as part of the spam blocker, then a computer program randomly selects your seats, and no, not a selection of options, but the number of seats you selected, you then have to work out from a rough floor plan where these seats are and whether you want them.

In this day and age this is bollocks. Surely any 19 year old programmer could come up with a piece ticket selling software that would allow you to select your own seat? I fail to see how them randomly assigning you a seat is a good thing for me the customer. It’s bloody irritating because what I really want to know is what seats are left, and which are the best ones and then I should be allowed to choose them myself. 

Village cinemas have software to do this, and it prevents you from leaving a gap between you and the next seat. If it’s good enough for an $18 movie ticket, then it’s good enough for $150 concert ticket!

I printed out the seat layout of the Vector Arena which give you a rough idea of the seating, but the seats I reckoned were the ideal seats weren’t available and I was in at 9:00am on the dot so they can’t have sold that quickly. It makes me wonder whether the arena is going to be laid out differently, or those seats are pre-pre-sold or being kept for later.

I would give Ticketmaster’s purchasing software a big thumbs down.

It’s 2008 people, I should be able to pick my own seats (I’m a grown up) online.

If Tickemaster can allow me to print out my own ticket and relieve me of hundreds of dollars, they can allow me to pick my own seat.

Side Show Pete Fatigue

The Winston Peters saga now seems to have developed a life of it’s own, and as such has gone from being a revelation to being a bit of a yawn. I suspect that shortly it will have reached proportions that will allow the MSM to dedicate the subject it’s own header button - you’ll have ‘National News’ ‘Regional News’ ‘Politics’ and ‘Winston Peters’.

This is not to say none of this is important, it is, because it demonstrates just how rotten politicians can become over time, especially if they end up having nothing else in their lives except their ‘jobs’. Peters has been there so long now he’s a permanent fixture but as Bob Jones points out in his article on stuff.co.nz he stopped being principled long ago and driven by personal ambition and hatred of the media.

Politicians do live in a rarefied atmosphere and insulated from the ‘real world’, the degree to which they become separated from reality is dependant on what they did before they got voted in, and the quality of their family life seems to play a factor.

If Peters lived in the real world he would have bowed out and turned his skills to something in the private sector - fund raising for example - but he is too deep in to see that he could have bowed out and done so in a positive way. It’s too late for that and even if the latest revelations don’t sink him, it clearly going to be a death by a thousand cuts and there is no way he can come out of it with a shred of dignity or credibility.

I’m surprised Peter Williams has allowed himself to be involved and dragged into such a messy event. While I don’t agree with everything he says, he is clearly someone with principals, whereas Peters seems to have abandoned his years ago. What on earth possessed him to think that Peters was a victim here is beyond me.

My prediction is that this will drag on so long that the voters will lose interest and it will descend into legal arguments that will go on well past the election. This means that Clark won’t need to reinstate him, getting her off the hook. I also think Peters will scrap 5% and be back into parliament. If NZ First was a real political party rather than what is so clearly a cash cow for Winston, then it’s membership base would have got together and ditched him. 

The one good thing to come out of this is National’s principled stand of not doing business with NZ First after the election, even if it means they dont go into government. That was a big call to make and maybe it shows that overall, there are some politicians out there with bottom lines after all, because the last month has tested that theory to the limits!

Great White

Macs have been putting out some interesting beers recently, one of the more recent being the ‘Great White’.

For those of you still drinking ‘lager’ you are missing out on a whole world out there that doesn’t revolve around fizzy canned crap.

Macs don’t put any preservatives in their beer, preservative 202 being a sulphate that some people (including me) get an allergic reaction to that blocks up the sinuses. This leads to nasty headaches the next day and comments about not being able to handle a few drinks. Why beer and wine brewers (the Aussies seem to think this ingredient is compulsory) put preservatives in their alcohol is beyond me. It perhaps shows lack of confidence in the level of consumption of their product - if it isn’t going to be drunk in six months then surely they have a serious problem with the markets attitude to their product?

Being able to have a couple of beers with dinner without having a cracking headache and blocked nose the next day would be nice, and it is a relatively common complaint. Beer never used to have preservatives in it, it didn’t need to have a shelf life of three years. Finally some companies are waking up to this, Macs being one of them.

If you have never tried ‘Witbier’ or White Beer -then here’s a chance to try something that isn’t lager. Wheat beer is brewed in the bottle and so there is a little bit of sediment in the bottom that you need to swirl around and pour into the glass. Wheat Beer is light, clean and refreshing, slightly sweeter than Lager although that is probably the wrong description and it shouldn’t put you off. Neither should the ‘tasting notes’ on the back of the bottle which are obviously a bit of a piss take, but which some people might take seriously and Macs might just be a bit too clever here with their marketing - it doesn’t taste like bubblegum!

The only downside is the bottle and a bit small, because this beer is so easy to drink you’ll find one isn’t enough. This beer doesn’t have to be chugged back with blackened BBQ, it goes well with white meat dishes and isn’t too bad with curry although that kills the taste a bit.

It’s a nice one after you’ve spent the afternoon in the garden, poured into a chilled glass with some bread and cheese and things like those massive olives from Australia, it goes down a treat!

Most supermarkets have it at about $14-15 a half dozen, although every week there seem to be promos on so you can pick it up cheaper. It’s as good as any of the the native German wheat beers which are about twice the price.

Our cat likes Jimbo’s

Not to be confused with the US based organic store the Jimbo’s I’m talking about is the NZ based purveyor of pet food. To be honest I think Jimbo’s is more suited to a pet food than an organics business.

Now I admit I had been resisting Jimbo’s because of their excruciating radio advertising, it took me a while to work out actually what they were advertising, I mean what was all that shit with people tooting their car horns? This is pet food folks, and the connection with Aucklanders stuck in traffic is???? Then again maybe they think there is a connection, was it meant to be funny? was there innuendo in there? WTF, I couldn’t work it out, I was confused and irritated so I stayed away from it. 

It might have been better if I had stayed away, because it’s turned one of our cats (the one training to be a Sumo Wrestler) into an annoying beast. 

It is now dawning on us what Jimbo’s mean by ‘irresitable’, this stuff is like the cat world equivalent to crack cocaine. Any time anyone heads for the fridge there’s the drumming of little feet as he comes charging across the kitchen… Christ mate, it’s 2am, I’m going for a pee not coming out to feed your face!

If one of the local horses is found ripped to shreds we will have Jimbo’s to blame because basically this cat food is just pure meat, and the one we’ve been getting is horse meat. Possibly it brings out the Big Cat buried deep within our ‘festively plump’ feline, and he pictures himself charging across the velt in pursuit of a wildebeest. At the moment the only charging he is doing is across the kitchen and under our feet, head butting out ankles and making plaintive mewing noises like we haven’t been feeding him for… a few hours.

Anyway, if your cat more likely to think of themselves as a big game hunter rather than chasing a pressed chunk of meat flavoured cereal by product around, then ditch the TVP (textured vegetable protein - Soy in plain language) cereal fillers and all the other odd stuff that seems to get put into cat food, I suspect that a lot of pet food is in fact marketed towards the owners, stupid little bits of something spongy in gravy, cats wouldn’t eat silly stuff like that is the wild. Grab a little punnet of Jimbo’s at the supermarket, you’ll be harassed every time you get near the kitchen, but your cat will thank you and apparently raw meat is better for their teeth. 

A vote for NZ First a vote for Labour

I blogged about this last month, my personal feeling being that Key had a lot to gain by ruling out a coalition with NZ First (read Winston First), and nothing much to lose.

Now Key has come out and effectively ruled out any coalition with NZ First - unless National get a proper explanation from Winston about what the hell’s been going on. The chance of this are nil, Winston is living in his own fantasy world where he is the most stunningly intelligent gifted politician in the universe, and the rest of us a thick, naive, brain dead morons who believe everything he says.

Winston has become so deluded that I think he actually believes himself, which is not surprising really, you would need to suspend belief to believe him, so for him to sound so convincing he has had to do the same thing.

The whole Winston saga, way back before any of the latest rubbish came to light, has always had a strong whiff of hypocrisy about it. Anyone who has taken more than a passing interest in his political career would know that most of his positions were untenable, and that as a populist he just pressed whatever buttons got a surge in his rating and to hell with principals or logic.

Sooner of later this was all going to bite him in the arse.

Well, finally, this may be happening.

If Key sticks to his word, he will go down as the first party leader to show some principals and guts when it came to NZ First. Oh, and sticking to your word doesn’t mean performing the same gymnastics that Clark pulls, it means you’ll not have anything to do with NZ First until we’re all completely clear about what’s going on, not you having some quiet meeting and being ‘personally’ satisfied with his explanation. All NZders deserve to know what has been going on because we foot the bill for this crap, and clearly some pretty fast and loose stuff has been going on that some might think looked a lot like corruption.

This position from Key has put him way up in my estimation. Politically it is a big call and possibly this indicates that in fact Key is someone who can make such decisions and will prove to be an effective and decisive leader.

Here’s a photo of Winston not attending the Bloodstock Auctions at Karaka in 2006… glad we got that cleared up!

Kylie due in NZ

‘Apparently’ Kylie Minogue is going to be doing a concert in NZ.

My track record on insider information (Blackberry Bold) has been rubbish to date, so I wouldn’t be putting too much stock in my information!

As far as I know this would be her first NZ concert, she did drop in a while back to promote some spin off product she has put her name to.

I see that she even has a range of bed linen, whatever next!?

Kylie has always been a pretty canny operator, and it’s always a bit of a shock to realise how old she is and how long she’s been pumping out that sugary, but highly polished, confectionery. Last year made it 20 years since ‘Locomotion’ (a cover of a 1962 song) appeared!

Apparently she does a pretty good performance, and it would be cool if she did make it here. I’m a bit of a fan, of all her… erm, ‘talents’ But seriously, she has done some pretty catchy hits and has managed to cross over generations, well I think she has, unless it’s just sad bastards in their late 30’s buying her albums. Come to think of it that might be the target audience, especially for her videos.

Unfortunately we seem to be a bit of a back water for international performers, almost like a transit lounge, if we can be avoided because of a head cold coming on, or the cat needs feeding so some other thin excuse, we get dropped like a piece of cast off lingerie!

NZ Climate change solution the wrong one

Watching the tortuous progress of our home grown Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) wend it’s way through various lobby groups and the usual political posturing, got me thinking, why are we bothering?

When you hear all the excitable green hyperbole about climate change, consider that it may well be that the climate is changing. Its done it before many times over millions of years so it’s not implausible, it also might have been bought on by human activity, but then again even if there was no human activity the odds are that the climate would change anyway.

There is no doubt that for some parts of the world a warming climate could have drastic effects, especially to those countries that have populated areas that would previously have been unsuitable for human habitation by using technology - one example is on our doorstep - Australia. It will also have an effect on poorer countries in say, Africa, who are already struggling and cannot survive now without external help.

From an entirely self interested perspective, shouldn’t we be first asking “what’s in New Zealand’s interests”?

If climate change is inevitable, why are we hobbling our already exposed business sector to higher production costs than our competitors for something that may in fact not affect NZ that badly? Maybe we would be better to create a fund that tackles the results of climate change so that we are at an advantage to our competitors when the effects start to appear.

Our biggest competitors for our main export products are countries that have not signed up to any agreements to attempt to mitigate climate change, and even if they did, they are unlikely to honour them in a meaningful way.

Does anyone seriously think that countries like China, India, Russia, Brazil etc are going to put themselves down the development stakes just to participate in some trading scheme with unprovable consequences? Do you think the citizens of those countries will agree to put their material aspirations on hold because of a climatic event that could occur in the future?

Yeah right!

Do you think the average third world factory workers lies in bed every night worrying about the possibility of rising sea levels and whether in twenty years he’ll need to buy an air-conditioner? unlikely, he’ll be worrying about the next meal, and whether some day his kids can go to university and he can have a wide screen TV! And it wont matter whether he lives in a democracy of dictatorship, if his countries leaders are thinking about their future, they will be worried about his aspirations, not the New Zealand Green Parties!

Climate change may in fact be good for NZ. If the sea level rises, we can adapt, we have plenty of land available, some crops we can’t grow now will be able to be grown, we have a small population and plenty of water. In fact we will be quite well placed.

The whole ETS is a crock. It is unlikely to change climate change events, and our annual carbon contribution probably doesn’t equal 10 minutes of China’s contribution, so why bother. Why should we go on some ideological crusade so we can be world leaders in something that is going to make our exports less competitive? We already struggle as it is, we are up against protectionist import tariffs (even with countries we have free trade agreements with), producer subsidies from South American to the EU, our distance from our markets and the increasing freight costs to those markets made worse by increasing fuel costs. Exporters, whom this country relies upon to merely maintain our very modest living standards, already have a mountain of obstacles to overcome to sell our products offshore.

So in our wisdom we throw another even bigger hurdle in front of them. All because we want to be seen to be doing something about climate change.

Our efforts are purely symbolic (and an irrelevant symbol at that) until the key polluters play the game, and they aren’t going too. We prove nothing, except that we are blinded by ideology rather than focused on our own interests, which is what our competitors in the global market place are doing. The South Americans aren’t fretting about their growing dairy cows farting making the climate warmer, to the contrary, they are eyeing our market for dairy and realising that this business is theirs for the taking, and it will make their country richer.

We in NZ are making the wrong decision for all the wrong reasons.

We should be placing a modest tax on polluters in NZ, but not because it might change global warming, but to create a fund that can be spent on exploiting the change in climate to our benefit and to mitigate the negative effects of those changes, such as moving low lying communities. The tax could be minuscule, because it will be years before the fund will need to be drawn on.

This is what is in our nations interests, looking after our future and ensuring that we maintain our export markets and the living standards that those markets provide us. We may be seen as a party pooper by some, but do you really think that the big players will care a toss about a tiny country of 4 million.

‘Wonderful’ Chinese Olympics

Well, the Olympics just gets better, aside from the cheating China has reneged on it’s word that the Olympics would bring change and freedom… Clearly the Chinese Communist Regime has an interesting interpretation of ‘freedom’.

In a sign that should reassure all those that fell for China and said they were going to be different, Chinese Police in Beijing have sentenced two women in the 70’s to a reeducation camp.

These women’s crime?

They had requested permission to protest at the designated protest areas because they claimed they had not been given fair compensation for their properties that were taken from them by the Regime to build flash venues for the Olympics.

They hadn’t actually got to protest, they merely asked for permission.

I hope everyone is enjoying the Olympics, I guess those in the west who have been apologists for the Communist Regime are safe in the knowledge that their grandmothers won’t be packed of to reeducation camp because they object to having their properties taken from them for a pittance.

For me the whole farce is tainted by the complete lack of respect for Chinese Citizens rights, even very basic rights that we in the ‘west’ wouldn’t think twice about. All the new buildings and facilities have been build on the backs and blood of Chinese citizens. If people think that is what the Olympics is about and if people in democracies can ignore the flagrant abuse of people human rights all in the name of a sporting event, then we’re all screwed

To get the full story (it gets better, one of them is blind and they both need walking sticks) go here.

Lawyer Speak - Winston First

There is a fascinating transcript of an interview NBR did with Brian Henry about how Winston financed, or did not finance, his legal bill, well actually it’s not a bill (yet) for the Electoral Petition last election (That Winston lost,).

It’s well worth reading because it shows you just the level of moral chicanery that these guy’s are up too.

I’ve seen this sort of thing before. It’s the same convoluted arguments and justifications and legalese, it’s something people in countries like China, Tonga, Pakistan, Russia would be used to hearing. Coincidentally all these countries are right down bottom of Transparceny International’s list rating corruption in countries internationally.

Fortunately we are still number one, but this sort of thing makes you wonder how long we can hold that spot, because I think it’s a slippery slope we are on!

Here’s the link to NBR’s interview... ‘enjoy’!

Blackberry Bold “later this year”

It now looks like my source was full of shit, and the Blackberry Bold aka 9000 is not coming to NZ until “later this year”. This could mean anything from next month to December.

I couldn’t wait any longer so I have made the switch to an iphone. There was no point getting a $900 phone that wasn’t on 3G.

Is the iphone better than the Blackberry?

Well I’ve only had it 12 hours so difficult to say. First impressions is that it is a very different phone. It does almost all the same things, but quite differently, but if you are a Mac user you will already know this. It’s a bit like comparing a PC to a Mac, at the end of the day they perform the same tasks with the same outcome, differently.

Having a Mac made it surprisingly easy to set up, it took about 5-10 minutes, I plugged the phone into my Macbook at home, it linked up with itunes and sucked in all my contacts, calendar, emails settings for my various accounts, music and video and an update and I was set.

I liked the Blackberry wheel, but then Blackberry have ditched this. The on screen navigation is clever on the iphone and will take a bit of getting used to. I don’t think the key board is as good as a tactile one, but then again, I was used to a full QWERTY keyboard and this is a big change.

I think I will miss push email, but then again, did I really need all that email? I usually ended up deleting a lot unread. Having lost the Blackberry Enterprise Server when I left my corporate job the seamless synchronisation that the Enterprise Server provided with Outlook has gone, so I was going to be plugging a Blackberry in to synchronise it anyway so some of the advantages of the Blackberry have diminished.

It works nicely on the home WIFI network and the web browsing is very cool with a crystal clear screen (apart from my sticky fingerprints) and it’s only a bit smaller than the PSP screen.

I confess that despite being a long term Mac user I would have got the Blackberry Bold if it has been available, but so far the switch won’t be quite as painful as I thought it might be. It will be how it interfaces with my work PC laptop that will be interesting. 

It’s a sexy package and as usual it has got the style you’d expect from any Apple product.