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.

You know this system is buggered when just a single investment propery alone (e.g an average 3 bedroom stand alone / single family house) one happens to own is appreciating in value faster than what one earns in their main job. And that is before considering the taxman coming to take his take off of my salary.

Sadly, none of the politicians I spoke to in the lead up to our last elections gave a hoot. National Party candidates in particular – they didn’t seem to care about the social impact of house price speculation and in fact seemed to be incredulous that I would vote against my own financial self interest.

Yeah well, what pride is there to live in such a socially and economically divided society? We’ve already long since lost our our egalitarian identity and we are already losing our social cohesion.

A lower high and a lower low so far in 2023 Q3 (Right most shaded column at the right end of the chart) – Whether anything will come out of this, who knows.

All I feel is, things are a little odd. High interest rates, yet asset prices appear to be stubbornly high and all the economic and business news appears to be overly lofty and positive, but I digress, what do I know?

 

Update 14 January 2024: Would be fairly safe to say that the original concern has now passed and nothing ultimately happened. Seems economic sentiment is still positive and in some cases exuberant. Previously held convention wisdom has pretty much been invalidated.

I still struggle to understand the widespread optimism though. Very little of the reports make sense or actually corroborate. That said, have invested in TQQQ last year and will allow it to ride for the time being to take advantage of the current mass exuberance. I still strongly assert that the markets have detached itself from reality and seems to be operating under fabricated spin in the run up to the US elections and wouldn’t be surprised there is astroturfing involved by the power elite as really nothing is marrying up to me as a lay man.

Discovered that my Huawei was bypassing my Pihole and ignoring my DNS settings resulting in ads being servering up in some apps. Symptoms was that upon initial launch of apps, the apps begain serving ads after 30 or so seconds.

Had to set “Private DNS” to “dns.adguard.com” and this appeared to stop it. Who knows if this fix will still be valid a week later.

Full moon photo from Auckland’s night sky…

Ended up cancelling my CostCo membership as I couldn’t make it work financially and I’m frankly too far away from CostCo Westgate. Once they open up more stores, and there is one available on my regular weekly routes, then will look to re-establish my membership.

That said, it was good to at least pop in to have a look and I’m still appreciative of them bringing in much needed added competition. I believe a CostCo membership is still beneficial for those who reside nearby and have an actual need to buy in bulk, be it for their family or community group.

One of the issues is that they rotate stock out frequently and it’s currently difficult to know what they have unless you physically visit their store (or go out on a limb and ask on the Westgate CostCo Community faceborg page and risk a barrage of snark). That’s until they open up their online store for New Zealand. For example this weekend, went to look for a dehumidifier and a new home gym (which I had seen on prior visits) and discovered CostCo Westgate had neither for sale.

Despite trawling all the aisles, I couldn’t convince myself to buy much, if anything this weekend. Arrived early, and parking was easy, but it feels as soon as I turned my back around, the place was absolutely slammed with people. Ended up only buying something for Lunch and having to navigate the checkout queues, then past the over crowded food court and then navigate the Car park traffic jam to get out. Ended up parking up in a spare parking bay along Gunton Drive and walked back in to get my Membership cancelled/refunded. Sorry, I just couldn’t do it anymore.

On other aspects…

• The staff can be mixed. Checkout staff were efficient. The sign up staff were friendly and I did feel sorry for advising I was here to cancel my membership. The door staff can be a bit like drill sergeants however.
• CostCo may not always be the cheapest, unless it’s on rebate, so still pays to compare pricing with your local supermarket.

Overall, CostCo is good for what it is I guess, but really only works for specific situations. I at least did appreciate the chance of just having a look around to see what it was all about. To close, I end with a cliche “It’s not you, it’s me” but “it’s not forever” and I plan to have another look in a few years.

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.

 

 

The issue I have with the events that have transpired over the weekend is that the result was really a loss for both sides of the transgender discussion. Not only that, the impact has apparently spilled over to inflict at least some mild transient damage to New Zealand’s reputation.

Instead of reasoned debate, we ended up in totally unnecessary and counter-productive violence of both the physical and verbal kind. The issue here is instead of making the other side more likely to see and come to understand your point of view, the attacks like this just make the other party dig in, radicalize and double down entrenching a war that frankly does no one any use.

Thought the cones in this scene may be a little excessive…

Picture of an urban waterfall, in Raumaga, Whangarei. Beware of the roaming / unrestrained Pitbull.

TL;DR Answer was found here. https://askubuntu.com/questions/1426476/ubuntu-22-04-audacity-does-not-show-up-in-pulseaudio-recording-tab

sudo apt install audacity -y

Admittedly, the process of trying to lay down and run Audacity initially gave me a bit of grief.

Wanted to install Audacity on my freshly laid down copy of Ubuntu 22.04 and all the references I could find of Audacity was to either install using “Snap” or “Flatpak”. Was apprehensive about Snap versions of any software and recall having grief with Audacity Snap before on my older machine giving me vague errors (e.g error -9985) about being unable to save or being unable to listen to a particular recording device. “Going Transport” –> “Rescan Audio Devices” did absolutely squat.

Even went back into Ubuntu Store and enabled all permissions on Audacity with again, nil effect. Appears nothing has changed (at the time of writing this post) two years on. As a Ubuntu user, I don’t have an overall very good impression of Snap at all having had issues with other Snap packages including with Flameshot (a screenshot tool) being unable to save to the Picture directory.

 

Traditional Hangi at Christmas.

An average picture of “The Tron” (Hamilton, New Zealand)