Can’t say I’m that impressed by Metro’s selection of the best Auckland restaurants. At least not the Thai choice. Thai Friends has the benefit of a nice view of the Domain, but the last time we went (a few months before we left NZ) the food was just so-so. The 2007 winner (Red Elephant) was an order of magnitude better. It even impressed my wife, which, when it comes to Thai restaurants, is extremely difficult to do.

Transpose Red Elephant’s menu and chefs to the Thai Friends location and you’d have the perfect restaurant. As it is, I’d rather put up with the crappy view of Khyber Pass and the motorway, and enjoy the steamed snapper and flaming chicken.

Interestingly, I have yet to find a Thai restaurant in London which comes even close to Red Elephant. The closest would be (coincidentally) Blue Elephant in Fulham — but that has variety in its favour rather than quality.

Cloud Camp London:

First talk, good. Last talk, good. Stuff in between… meh.

Highlights of the evening: catching up with Ben. And, after 7 years, finally meeting Alan (the last talk!) in person…

…even if it was only for a few minutes.

Scott blinkin’ rocks.

It appears the only one who’s lost contact with reality is the NZ finance minister…

On one hand:

In particular, households are being squeezed by higher fuel prices since the budget, he said. Gasoline prices have surged 14 percent the past three months

and then on the other:

…workers needed to be aware of the outlook for the economy when they made wage claims… …Wage expectations in the public sector haven’t caught up with the changing economic environment. Some have lost a bit of contact with reality.

The word that jumps to mind starts with T and ends with WIT.

As a matter of interest, just searched on Google for “wordpress shopping cart” to see how far down the list YAK turned up. Surprisingly, it’s on the first page. Well, the bottom of the first page, but it is the first page.

Cool geek-out moment!

I only found out the Wii was (might be) region-locked after carting all my Wii stuff from NZ to the UK. A rather depressing thought — I’d have to export any new games I wanted from back home.

I contacted Nintendo UK to find out for sure, and they confirmed, yes it was region locked… but then went on to describe the region locking as though it was tied to the TV colour encoding system. They continued, “For example, the UK uses PAL-a, and New Zealand uses PAL-b which should be compatible”.

I’m guessing the question was completely misunderstood.

Anyway, rather then destroying any chance of becoming carbon-neutral this century, I thought it was worth buying a local game and trying it out. Zack & Wiki duly arrived from Amazon, and was inserted, with some trepidation, into the console… and worked perfectly.

Conclusion: if the Wii region encoding is controllable by the publisher, as some have reported (see the comments of that page), then Capcom, at least, have not exercised that control. Well done Capcom, and… awesome game, by the way.

HP + EDS

Two wrongs making a right? Only time will tell.

Through cruel (pronounced in melodramatic fashion with emphasis on all the verbs) twist of fate, I wound up clicking on a spam link the other day.

I never click on spam links. To mix a few metaphors, one has to be rather too many brain cells short of a four-cylinder engine to click on anything in a spam message.

I do have an excuse for my actions, although rather a feeble one: I was skimming rather quickly through my new mail and went from one email, from my father, to another. The second email was about replica watches.

Why is he sending me emails about replica watches?

The email was in a similar format to some of his others (a paragraph of text followed by a link), but the words “replica watches” and that link somehow caught my attention. An ominous orchestral theme should have started up as I moved my mouse, in slow motion of course, towards that little blue underlined set of characters…

I realised yesterday, after receiving another message about replica watches that I’d been duped. By the bizarre combination of a spam message formatted exactly the same as another, and the fact that Thunderbird occasionally doesn’t update the header info (from address, subject, etc) at the top of the message when I flick through too fast.

And somewhere there’s a twit with Dr Evil ambitions who’s currently rubbing his hands together with glee, because the “sucker” light has just flicked on next to my email address. I can look forward to an inundation of messages about cheap gucci bags, replica watches, “enlargement” remedies, and so on.

Needless to say, I won’t be buying that Breitling at the fraction of the price of the original.

Response from someone who grew up in the somewhat tectonically active east coast of NZ (i.e. me):

…

Meh

…

A somewhat surreal conversation with my daughter last night:

“Papa, what’s yod?”

“What’s WHAT??”

“Yod!”

“I don’t know.”

Kid wanders off, and comes back 2 minutes later.

“What’s yod?”

“I don’t know. What do you mean by yod? I don’t know any such word.”

Kid sighs in exasperation (conveying depths of feeling only possible in the average 5 year old), and stalks off down the hallway…. singing the NZ National Anthem to herself:

“Yod of Nations, at thy feet, in the bonds of yove we meet”.

Ah… that Yod…