Unfortunately, I sense property prices may be on their (silent and sneaky) march upwards despite media reporting to the contrary and despite house prices still being ludicrous.

The real issue I have with inflated house prices is that it’s makes everyone’s lives difficult and apart from the issues faced with aspiring first home buyers (essentially whom we’ve failed to maintain the social contract with). It also presents issues elsewhere including

• For existing homeowners who may want to move to another property more suited to their current living arrangement, this includes (but limited to) when up sizing for a growing family, downsizing for when the kids have left home, when a marriage dissolution occurs, or moving to a place closer to their work. These costs include (again not limited to). Bridging finance, agents fees based off a percentage of the value of the property

• Takes money away from the productive economy. People will more likely end up prioritizing their spending towards keeping a roof over their heads.

Unfortunately, I can’t see this changing anytime soon. There’s still too much money flowing around that is looking for a home (pun not intended) born out from people who missed out last time, to investors trying to front run the market with the expectation of further rate falls, to increasing cost of compliance red tape surrounding corporates trying to engage in regulatory capture, Health and Safety, Anti Money Laundering and increasing provision to guard gainst all manner of increasing exposure to liablity events while we are trying to build new housing (everyone is mobilizing to arse cover).

Picture of southern lights

 

Lanterns hanging from the trees

Robinhood in reverse. Slashing and burning essential public services in order to give tax cuts to the landlords.

The optics surrounding this are not good and do not at all reflect positively on this National party led government – and I say this as (confessingly) a Landlord myself.

I’m far more concerned with seeing policy to support us living in a cohesive society and struggle to see how the carte Blanche slashing of important services (and capping wages of those working in those services) is in any way conducive to this.

And it was the National Candidates in the run up to the last election whom showed complete disinterest (compared to other parties, even ACT) when I raised the issue of housing affordability and the negative affects it was having on our nation and our society.

Update 5th February 2024: Have now tested negative. Apart from sleeping for much longer and a dry cough, symptoms are largely gone. Overall, for me, felt like a longer acting but milder version of the flu.

Symptoms initially appeared mid last week sometime but daily Rapid Antigen testing only began showing positive 4-5 days after symptoms first appeared.

So far symptoms have been rather mild (so far). More like a mild / low grade influenza with mild fever for only a day and a tickly / itchy throat for the rest of it,

That said, it’s appears to affect everyone differently and quite vastly so. Have had APAC Development team members at work being knocked out for weeks at a time.

Full moon photo from Auckland’s night sky…

Early spring clean. Photo of product packaging that I dug out from the closet.

Issue is, some of this packaging is so elaborate and fancy inside the box, that you don’t want to throw it away. It does make me wish there was a practical way to send such packaging back to the manufacturer to reuse.

For me personally, a return to full price adult fares is a deal breaker and will likely result in a substantial drop in my utilization of Auckland Public Transport. Half price fares did compel me to at least try out public transport to get around Auckland predominantly during the weekends (including picking up groceries at Pak n’ Save Glen Innes).

That said, it was a shit show of cancelled services, missed connections, helping out fellow public transport users who were lost, avoiding the derranged, taking two hours to get to your destintation when a car could do it in a third or even a quarter of the time. Frankly, I felt like a second class citizen and that the powers to be really couldn’t give a toss about Public Transport users.

My place of employment (East Tamaki) is poorly served by public transit so I don’t have the opportunity to use public transport regularly (even though I have longed for decades for being able to do so) and subsequently it doesn’t make sense for me to buy a monthly pass. I have to join the throngs of other single occupant cars to make the 16 km journey (32 km return) to and from work as the only pragmatic balance between cost, personal safety, and time.

Will be going back to using my car more in the weekend, even accounting for the 30c tax and excise being added back on. A bus fare of $2.37 for one way one zone travel just isn’t compelling for me in many situations. More so for short journeys that cross a zone boundary. That said exceptions where Public transport could still work for me…

• $4.20 to get into the CBD, with a $8.40 round trip, Cheaper than driving (single occupant) and paying for parking. That said, I don’t find myself needing to go into the CBD very often at all.
• Travel from the end of one zone to the other end (e.g Eastern Suburbs to New Lynn), typically using Bus 75 and hopping on the Western Line trains at Newmarket. The Same journey in an ICE car would probably be $6-8 one way  inclusive of wear and tear

Photo of one of four hidden lakes within the Southern end of Waiuku forest.

Received this perplexing rookie error while trying to undertake maintenance on one of my virtual servers.

An error occurred during the signature verification. The repository is not updated and the previous index files will be used. GPG error: https://packages.matrix.org/debian bullseye InRelease: The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG F473DD4473365DE1 matrix.org packages packages@matrix.org

Apparently apart from running the usual such as…

/usr/share/keyrings$ sudo wget -O /usr/share/keyrings/matrix-org-archive-keyring.gpg https://packages.matrix.org/debian/matrix-org-archive-keyring.gpg

…I needed to also hop into /etc/apt/sources.list and comment out the line…

deb https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main

e.g From…

# deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-security multiverse
deb https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main
# deb-src https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main

…To…

# deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-security multiverse
# deb https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main
# deb-src https://matrix.org/packages/debian/ focal main

After that, was able to upgrade my Matrix Synapse homeserver without error

Home time traffic on a Friday. Just as well I was working from home today. If I had to deal with this again on a regular basis. Would absolutely lose my freaking mind.

Auckland transport suggest that the Bus Driver Shortage afflicting the region will likely draw to a close in September. That long?

Unfortunately, it seems a few employers are still keen to force people back in the office at all costs while openly admitting that productivity while people were working from home was not actually a problem but simply to say it was “Sad” to walk into a sparse office – I struggle to see how this is a well throughout reason for lumping employees with such a heavy personal cost just to fill “bums on seats” in terms of personal time, commuting cost + stress along with mental health, and more importantly morale.

Luggage exhibit from the Maritime Museum at the Viaduct.