Update: 9:41 p.m. – Appears to have just been resolved.
Apparently DuckDuckGo is down…
Anything I try to search will return the above error. Been like this for at least an hour.
DuckDuckGo is down
NRMA Motoring and Services + ClubAssist (Battery service)
This post is more of a personal point of reference (leading on from an ongoing, personally conducted investigation into a different matter)…
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National Roads and Motorists’ Association (“The NRMA”) to me these days are more of a Travel and Tourism company and would say in my own sole opinion they are perhaps now a different organization from what they were originally before demutualization.
They apparently own several Resorts & Holiday Parks, Travelodge Hotels (as a Joint venture with TOGA / TFE Hotels), Manly Fast Ferries, Thrifty Car rental Australia & NZ along with a couple of Tour companies. To confuse matters, they do not actually own NRMA Insurance (which is currently a brand of Insurance Australia Group since 2000) nor do they own NRMA MotorServe (now also a brand of IAG). Even to this day, appears many of their own clients and members are unaware of the distinction between NRMA Insurance and NRMA Motoring and Services.
Some NRMA roadside assistance personnel (while still being provided with a NRMA branded Van and Uniform) are in fact employed through a separate company called Club Assist who NRMA Motoring and Services have contracted out to for the provisioning of battery replacement sales + assistance, and auto-glass replacement to their members. While it looks like NRMA owns 30% of Club Assist, I’m not sure how many of the other Roadside Assistance personnel are still directly employed by or otherwise contracting directly to NRMA Motoring and Services.
Club-Assist are apparently contracted to do quite a bit of the Battery related call out work by other Motoring clubs in Australasia including Automobile Association Batteries here in NZ and supply batteries bearing the branding of the Motoring club they’re working for. That said, anecdotally, some people within my immediate social circles have claimed they did not find them the best value (Club Assist reps are allegedly incentivised to sell new batteries) and I would say it still pays to shop around if you’re in need of a new battery.
Club-Assist have also been deploying the NRMA branded charging stations over New South Wales along with the RACV branded charging stations across Victoria.
Real Life Facebook
Real Life Facebook, an Older YouTube Skit from Australian Comedian, Kinne
(Click picture below to access YouTube Clip)…
Stream of Consciousness Week 22nd June 2020
Stream of consciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into its own separate post…
- Was good to catch up with some old friends who I haven’t seen in a while (who now live outside of Auckland) and just actually relax this weekend along with visiting some older haunts.
Older Stream of Consciousness thoughts can be found here.
No holds barred bragging
Caught my eye while cruising homely.com.au. Inflated ego award goes to… *Drum roll*…
“I’m better than all of you, you are all losers, look at me me me, it’s all about me!”
Asking to have one’s backside kicked. (Figuratively speaking of course)
Pumping up the Money Supply, the ultimate treatment for financial market ailments?
Disclaimer: Not financial advice (as with anything else in this blog)
With endless money ‘printing’ and liquidity injection, the US Financial Markets have almost completely (if not completely) decoupled from their underlying real economy. Financial markets globally no longer represent the general health of their respective economies by any reasonable measure I feel.
The decoupling I believe started way back in the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 when liquidity creation was employed to restart the economies. So far since then, it seems when any sort of crises happens to spook the market, the treatment response has been to pump even more liquidity into the system and it seems to have been surprisingly extremely effective at least at treating any symptoms for the last 12 years.
What the end game is? I don’t know. It goes back to a post I penned back in November 2019 where I asked what would be a trigger to a sustained correction? (Not just short sharp corrections of the types we’ve been having recently)
One potential threat which could end up defeating the effectiveness of such monetary policy would include some sort of catastrophic, devastating and tragic famine by way of insect plague or widespread natural disaster where food security gets impacted and food supply contracts causing food prices to spiral out of control (by way of hyper inflation) where people find themselves being forced to sell assets into a sliding market to feed themselves and their families just to survive. Continue reading “Pumping up the Money Supply, the ultimate treatment for financial market ailments?”
No new active COVID-19 cases in NZ
There are officially no more known ‘Active’ COVID-19 cases in New Zealand. We move down in to Alert Level 1 tonight.
Still need to be vigilant obviously.
“We will almost certainly see cases here again. That is not a sign we have failed.”
“If we get one or two cases in the future – which will remain possible for some time to come due to the global situation and nature of the virus – we need to shut down those cases fast. The last thing … we want to do is move up the alert level system again.”
My feeling is though, heading into the Winter seasons in future years, it may still be a good idea to practice some sort of social distancing primarily to protect the more vulnerable in our communities.
Stream of Consciousness Week 1st June 2020
Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into its own separate post…
- The question of the weekend: Can continually adding financial stimulus keep the economy propped up indefinitely regardless of what happens? Or is there a point where this plan will simply stop working and we end up paying for it dearly? What is the end game here? On that vein, the current rally being a bull trap, as part of a great depression style bear market, is something that has become less likely. Looking more towards a secular side ways market with large up and down gyrations, must like we had from 2000 to 2009.
- Road Trip to visit some parks and beaches situated in the northern part of the Whangarei district.
- Western sentiment in the last few days appears to have suddenly snapped back to “life is normal” again. More celebrity, pro-sports and entertainment news making the headlines once again. Casinos and entertainment venues around the world reopening.
- Ticking things off for the sake of ticking them off admittedly isn’t my buzz personally and is not really how I prefer to spend my leisure time.
- Headlines such as “We’re in a new paradigm for stocks, this analyst argues. Get ready for permanently higher valuations“ sounds eerily familiar in a Deja Vu sense. The terms in question being “new paradigm” and “permanently high”. Refer to this chart on the Transport Geography page.
Older Stream of Conciousness thoughts can be found here.
Stream of Consciousness Week 25th May 2020
Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into it’s own separate post…
- Walked Pae O Te Rangi Farm Summit, looping back via the Disc Golf Course. Fairly short walk of approximately 2 hours return. Track is not marked on any of the Topomaps I can see, however, was present on the Kauri Die Back map as being an open track. Open Tracks PDF Auckland Council.
- You know why people are saying the COVID Tracing QR codes ain’t working? Because there are two systems which are branded so similarly (with the yellow stripes), no wonder people are complaining when they use the official COVID-19 NZ Tracer app, they get an error. See both the official NZ COVID Tracer app developed by Rush Digital for the Ministry of Health NZ and then Simple Trace developed by a separate company called Springload.
- Easy and cheap credit I feel is eroding the value of working. Seems the days of actually earning your keep and then using your hard-earned money to say buy a place of your own is now getting further and further out of reach of people. The pathways are disappearing. We are rewarding rampant speculation, supporting zombie corporations that should have gone under decades ago, investment into non-productive assets and further deepening the wealth divide.
Older Stream of Conciousness thoughts can be found here.
Featured gallery from the Photo Archives.
Stream of Consciousness Week 18th May 2020
Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into it’s own separate post…
- Huntly Bypass was apparently opened on early March 2020. Only discovered it last night 17May2020 when coming home where I found that the Expressway continued on after Taupiri. The Weekend just past has been the first weekend on Covid-19 alert level 2 (Previously, interregional travel was not permitted)
Older Stream of Conciousness thoughts can be found here.
NextCloud Snap Packages updated to version 18
Just saw a notification that the Snap NextCloud installation I had running had been updated to version 18.0.4. For me this is fairly significant in that you can now self host your own office suite with “ONLYOFFICE” community edition and if you are ambitious enough, allowing the option to move away from the likes of Google and Microsoft (Office 365).
The catch is that you have to set it up yourself by installing the needed Apps. To do this, go into Profile, then Apps and enable “Hub Bundle” (or at the very least “Community Document Server” and “ONLYOFFICE”)
Upon doing that, I ran into headaches with this vague and unhelpful error message…
Diving into the nextcloud.log… (the location of which is going to be different depending on your installation. Helpful I know.)
"message":"Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 315857416 bytes)
I had to fire up an SSH session and send the following commands (applicable to Ubuntu Linux). One to increase the memory limit to 512 Megabytes and the 2nd one to restart the NextCloud service….
sudo snap set nextcloud php.memory-limit=512M sudo snap restart nextcloud
Back in NextCloud’s web interface, navigated back to Apps section and tried Enabling the Hub bundle again. Still got a flipping error!
"Cannot declare class OCA\\Talk\\Migration\\Version2000Date20170707093535, because the name is already in use at xxxxxxxxxxx"
At a loss as to now what to do, I then went through for each App under the Hub Bundle, clicking on Enable one by one and it worked for some completely and disconcertingly unknown reason (No errors happened this time around… have no idea why, sorry.)
After that, I went back to my Files and had a play at creating new word documents… (Success I guess)
Seems to work pretty well for a family user set up, even on the lowest tier VPS plan with my provider. (1CPU / 2GB RAM). Included with the ONLYOFFICE suite is a Word Processor, Spread Sheet and Presentation (slides) application. At the moment, the biggest issue I can see is the lack of a working spell checker on the community server plugin as reported here and here which I feel is fairly fundamental to a Word Processor. Little bit concerning is that the web browser based (core or plugin based) spell checkers don’t appear to work inside of it either.
I think at this stage, for word processing, will stick with using the visual Markdown editor “Text” (by Julius Härtl) and continue trailing out the Spread Sheet application by doing my Tax return on it and then reporting back here.
Despite the messing around and troubleshooting to get it working I’m overall pretty otherwise pleased with the “Only Office” implementation (Community Server plugin) as a proof of concept.
Say Cheese
A little bit of comedy: Troy Kinne – Say Cheese. (Click picture below to access YouTube Clip)
Stream of Consciousness Week 20th April 2020
Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into it’s own separate post…
- Looks like we are indeed going to need to be a lot more cognizant of all respiratory diseases and not just Coronaviruses going forward I feel. If CoVid-19 is causing this much concern, then Influenza while not the focus at the moment I assert is also a bit of a worry. Even though we have Vaccines for seasonal Influenza, my current feeling is that they have been pretty woefully ineffective in recent times, particularly in the elderly. Some sort of social distancing and social counter measures every flu season is likely to remain for the foreseeable future.
Older Stream of Conciousness thoughts can be found here.
Stream of Consciousness Week 6th April 2020
Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week and which will be added to as the week rolls on. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into it’s own separate post…
- It is worth highlighting that “Coronaviruses” are a type (or class if you will) of Virus. These include Common human coronaviruses which may only produce a mild, cold like, symptoms. I do wonder how reliable the test kits have been… How many false positives and false negatives there have been and has there been any such follow-up testing or otherwise investigation to ensure we aren’t picking up ordinary common coronaviruses as CoViD-19 and vice versa.
- One positive thing about the lock down is that upon walking once were busy streets, you’re no longer suffocating in petrol and diesel fumes any more. This was especially so with busier roads such as Remuera Road, Lunn Avenue and St Johns Road for example.
- Discovered some new tracks around the neighbourhood that I haven’t even realized that were there. Will probably go back and explore that track network later on.
- Trialling YouTube red for a while. Probably the best time to do it.
Other CoVid-19 thoughts have been rolled up into their own post.
Stream of Consciousness Week 30th March 2020
Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may be either be edited, deleted or otherwise spawn out into it’s own separate post…
- This period, would certainly be a time to learn new stuff. Trying to learn more about general Linux server administration and getting more into the guts of this. More for my own edification mainly for personal projects. In a small way, it may increase, slightly, the opportunities available.
- The Remuera Golf Course has been closed for golf and has been kindly opened up for public access walking and jogging during the lock-down period. It’s a good large area to walk around and explore and recommend at least 2 hours if you want to stroll the entire area. Though try to stay off any greens that are under maintenance. Restricted to those local to the area obviously.
- Snitching on your fellow citizens… RNZ Audio Bite. While could be argued that the new Police form to report CoViD-19 L4 breaches is an essential tool to aid compliance, I am concerned that it may also inevitably breed fear, contempt and distrust of fellow citizenry in one’s community. I am also concerned that some may be treating this like game in that some people may derive a twisted sense of gratification reporting others… Like idiots who repeatedly upload snore-fest videos cataloguing a series of (minor) driving mistakes to YouTube from their Dashcam and acting all virtuous and sanctimonious about it.
Other CoVid-19 thoughts have been rolled up into their own post.
Retro City
Revisiting an old rendition of SimCity Classic while stuck at home…
Downloadable from the Windows Store as RetroCity. Beware, Windows Store pop up nags.
Mass Clinical Trial of potential treatments against CoVid-19
Clinical trials of potential candidates for CoVid-19 treatments are now currently underway to see if any of the below mentioned drug combinations offer any efficacy in slowing down or reducing the effect of CoVid-19 on patients.
Science Mag: WHO launches global mega trial of the four most promising treatments
Potential treatment candidates include…
- Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine
- Remdesivir
- Ritonavir/lopinavir
- Ritonavir/lopinavir + interferon beta
I’d expect there will be other potential treatments in the pipeline coming online to be ready for clinical trials.
In my own non-professional opinion, if any of these clinical trials are actually successful, the earliest we could perhaps see these treatments becoming mainstream is may be 5-9 months. I would currently pick in reality this could be over a year, but again I reiterate this is a stab in the dark prediction.
CoVid19 is indeed a very serious series of viruses and firm + swift proactive steps need to be taken, particularly with protecting the most vulnerable in our community (e.g The elderly, those who are immunocompromised and those with serious pre-existing medical conditions). At the same time, I still assert that I see a totally needless, unhelpful and counter-productive level of group think, panic and herd mentality that is being perpetuated in an epic unprecedented feedback loop across social media channels and the majority of the Mainstream media / Mass media outlets globally.
Stream of Consciousness Week 9th March 2020
Stream of conciousness and other personal thoughts garnered throughout the week. These thoughts are unrefined, unquantified, unverified, and raw. Any of these may get spawned out into its own separate post or removed entirely…
- Phone Cameras are improving quite substantially. I am often asked by others what Camera I have used to take the photos I have posted to NUI.NZ and express surprised that the majority of them have been taken on a phone.
- One area that phone cameras have not caught up yet is with Telephoto. A lot of hybrid zoom technology still produces very rough images. Recommended you still carry a dedicated travel zoom for these situations.
- 1/2.3 inch sensors in dedicated cameras are like the 1366×768 screen resolutions in laptops. Plentiful in the market but for me are a bit of a turn off.
- A (possible) start of a sideways secular market was detected around the middle of 2019 and was judged to have started around the beginning of 2018
- The markets are now approximately 20-25% off of their peak. Probably expect further falls in the coming week (Written 10th March 2020 NZDT)
- An issue of trying to mix cyclists and cars on Auckland’s road network is that the presence of cyclists tend to disrupt traffic flow due to the roads not being made to accommodate cycling activities. On a more extreme case. Cyclists tend to use the pedestrian/cyclist crossing on Highbrook Drive. While they are absolutely within their right to do so, it does cause vehicles to have to brake (brake wear and tear) and additional fuel use (due to needing to accelerate back up to speed)
.NZ Domain Yearly registration prices are to rise.
The .nz Domain prices are to rise after InternetNZ announces wholesale price increases. Claim is that registrations are falling. Monthly Registration statistics can be found here… https://docs.internetnz.nz/reports/
I believe a lot of the more recent new domain registrations were speculative after the release of the direct second level registrations under .nz and feel that may be it’s just a gradual decline back to the mean.
Increasing prices in my view will no doubt accelerate the so-called decline. I plan to have a look into their financials when I get a chance. (I don’t expect to find any irregularities – though worth checking for my own edification)