Originally posted 28th January 2017, updated 29th March 2017

Eventually ended up acquired the young.kiwi domain name to replace the longer young.kiwi.nz (which I’ve since dropped). I guess as well as representing my last name, the “young” + “kiwi” word combination does have a nice ring to it. The young.nz domain is still in a conflicted state with about 5 different claims on it and it looks unlikely anyone will get it any time soon.

Not quite sure what is going on with dot Kiwi and their domains. Their front page is incorrectly indicating domains which are taken as being available. Additionally, late last year, young.kiwi couldn’t be registered (had some funny lock on it preventing registration), and prior to that, the dot Kiwi registry was trying to hock it off as a premium domain name for a thousand dollars.

There is also a bit of an identity issue with “Kiwi” as a word in itself. Seems everywhere else in the world, the word Kiwi is firmly linked to Kiwifruit (Chinese Gooseberry) as opposed to New Zealand’s Native Bird, or a New Zealander / New Zealand CItizen, or anything about New Zealand as such. Go to Google NCR (“No Country Redirect”) and type in “Kiwi” to see what I’m referring to.

As an aside, how is this for unusual pricing? The young.blog is listed with an asking price of 110,000 USD per year. Not sure who will go for those with the plethora of Top Level domains to choose from these days. Continue reading “Domain names” →

General Snaps from various Auckland CBD locations.

Watched Indiana Jones – “Raiders of the lost ark” + Orchestral performance by the Auckland Philharmonia at the Civic Theatre in town, which was quite a jolly performance. Continue reading “Auckland Arts Festival” →

Did some very superficial improvements to eek out a few microseconds for KAHA .

Decided to kill off a few install scripts, mostly examples / evaluation prototypes from the “Forum Feasibility Project” and this seems to have lightened the load a minuscule. Performance speed of this site fails due to having not many of the usual server side optimizations in place (G Zip compression), also haven’t bothered to make much use of many if any Contend Distribution Networks (CDNs).

Regarding “Time to First Byte” (TTFB), running to about 2-8 seconds. Not quite sure what’s up with that, seems even a static html test page will take a long time for the server to start serving it up. After the tweaks, it still hasn’t improved… Seems to be quite stubborn. Disabling plugins seem to reduce the TTFB by about 20%, but still not as much as I would like.

Have since found the impacting factor is actually SSL. Turn that off and make everything just regular HTTP as opposed to HTTPS, the TTFB reduces to nothing. Re-enable SSL and it jumps back up to a few seconds.

NUI.NZ will always be slow(er). It’s practically a photo gallery.

Returned back to Cowan Stream. It’s a goodie which I’ve done several times in the past. Really enjoy the soak there and the opportunities to jump of rocks into the pools below. Including a friendly Eel at the base of one of the falls.

Small group Explore around Destruction Gully Near Whatipu along the Manukau Harbour.

Fishermen were naturally edgy as we walked along the coast, evidently afraid that we might be fishery officers.

11th February 2017 – Random pictures with a walk around Pukekohe Hill and Waitangi Falls around the former Franklin District.

Waitangi Falls

Waitangi Falls

A paddling of ducks near Waitangi Falls

A paddling of ducks near Waitangi Falls

Pukekohe Hill

Pukekohe Hill

Pukekohe Hill

Pukekohe Hill

Pukekohe Hill

The only real unobstructed view from Pukekohe Hill

I still need to draw down the excessive annual leave racked up and travel overseas, somewhere, anywhere, for say a month.

Grapes overhanging a fence at a friend’s place in Papakura…

Grapes overhang Carl’s fence

Grapes overhang Carl’s fence

Grapes overhang Carl’s fence

30th January 2017 – Wairoa Cosseys Track (one way involving car shuttle) Redux. Fairly easy walk through some pretty lush bush. Due to the ambient temperature of 27°C, still ended up hitting my heat limit a number of times. Hunua Falls upon our arrival was packed with people looking to cool off in the pool at the base of the falls.

Wairoa Cosseys Track, Hunua

Swing bridge at Wairoa Cosseys Track, Hunua

Wairoa Cosseys Track, Hunua

Hunua Falls

Wairoa Cosseys Track

Hunua Falls. Packed like a Zoo

Hunua Falls. Packed like a Zoo

I have since switched mobile provider with the change-over having occurred on Monday 16th January 2017. In short, was enticed by a better plan arrangement at Spark with more being offered at the same price point for my specific individual usage pattern. Continue reading “Changed Mobile Provider” →

In my latest grief with my ASUS N550JV Laptop… Upon returning back home from my tramping (hiking) trip, I received “Display driver igfx stopped responding and has successfully recovered” (Event ID 4101) Over and over and over and over and over while trying to upload the photos from the aforementioned trip to my website.

Yes, the ASUS N550JV was giving me grief yet again. Though thankfully I think I’ve finally nailed this at least for the time being. In the end, it involved several hours of trying out many different drivers off of the Intel website and then testing whether or not the issue went away.

Continue reading “Intel HD Graphics IGFX Display driver crashes” →

Update 4th January 2017 – Happy to announce that the “mega rage face” status can now be retracted. The weather on the trip turned out to be kind enough to open up a few hours after arriving at Okaka hut, rewarding our climb with views including a spectacular sunset on top of Humpridge Track.  Thankfully the Computer modeled weather forecasts did not eventuate in their entirety!

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Yargh… Earlier in the week, saw the Tuesday 27th forecast appear around the corner and thought hopefully that it will go away.  Looking again today and much to my chagrin, I get presented with this…

It would be perhaps fair to remark “It probably doesn’t get much worse than this”.  (if weather conditions got worse, the operator would likely cancel the trip, refund us the monies and we go on our merry way to do something else)

Will pack my blue raincoat (the Swazi one) which seems to have an interesting ability to repel Rainy weather /s (as well as the regular poncho)

Rain itself I don’t mind (being rain falling on me), but simply going down there and climbing up 900m to simply see solid white / grey will likely drive me silently bonkers as it did when I did Waikaremoana and walked up the bluff only to see Stark White.

Yeah, If weather turns out to be shite and all I get is solid gray to see, I fully intend to go back down again at some later date (i.e before Christmas next year) and take up the chopper option up to the top, walk down and and do the River to Lake Jet boat (if they offer that activity combination as an option).

I’ve already forfeited my Farm Stay / Hunting Trip invite (from another circle of good friends) to attend the Humpty walk and it would be extremely disrespectful to fellow group companions to pull out. Here’s hoping that the computer modeled forecasts are wrong.

History of these domain names (being both kaha.nz and nui.nz) is that they were acquired for a personal project to create an online space (Forum, private social network, or other web CMS) for organizing outings and events informally and casually between a small group of friends away from relying on Centralized and Commercialized Networks such as Facebook and Meetup

Part of the prescription was that this new “space” had to be accessible via Mobile, the domain names needed to be easily typed in to a mobile device and in this case, shorter the better. Appears with the .nz domains names not being as recognisable or respected as the .co.nz ones, both of the aforementioned domain names were freely available for registration at the time (and had been for several months after the DNC Preferential Rights of Registration period had ended),

However, the project, apart from setting up multiple props for evaluation, in effect never took off and it was at this stage, the allure of facebook was found / assessed to be nigh impossible to break for the social circle that it was intended for (the same social circle, which originally suggested creating an alternative), and I have since decided to pick up and use these domains myself for my own personal use.

Labour Weekend Trip to the Kaimanawas including Mount Urchin to Waipakihi Hut.

Mini Trip report included with Album.

Short stop at Clevedon Strawberries + Leisurely Sunday afternoon

This post is skippable unless one is really really bored or perhaps insanely curious. The rather Yawn inducing details leading up to my re-assimilation into the faceborg collective… Continue reading “Details of the 3rd Facebook Assimilation” →