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.

Finally bit the bullet and replaced the Jetpack Photo Carousel on both peak.nz and nui.nz with the one from dFactory.  The dFactory one after a little bit of testing offers a number of advantages …

• More Mobile Friendly.  Pictures can be made to display at Maximum Screen extents, better utilizing the real estate of a small screen.  The older carousel had some challenges where by the picture would appear very small.
• Support for zooming in on both Mobile Devices and Desktop.  Users Can now pinch zoom natively. (Using one of their pay plugins)
• Browser Back Button behaviour is more intuitive.  In the old Carousel, once you finished sliding through all the pictures, closed the carousel light box, and hit the back button (to go back to the front page / album listing), it would instead relaunch the carousel and show you the last picture.  Continue hitting the back button, it would go back through the photos you had just viewed (in reverse).  The dFactory lightbox eliminates this (at least on most browsers I’ve tested this plugin with)

So far, everything appears to be working pretty well. Will probably deactivate and remove jetpack in due course. Jetpack (as a whole) is good for certain sites, though probably too fully featured and some components of it too heavy for personal homepages like this one, I feel.

History of these domain names (being both peak.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.

Having another crack at forums. If anyone wants to use it (looking at those who have been tugging on my shirt), feel free to do so.

No need to register nor log in to post. (Silent spam protection enabled)

Forums can be found here… https://peak.nz/forums/

Have since made the Forums to display better on Mobile devices (The original CSS / Styling that came with the plug-in wasn’t at all Mobile friendly, it’s now at least semi-acceptable)

Post anything you want. (Except spam and scams of course.)

If there is enough interest, I can look to deploy a fully fledged Discourse forum

Embedded IRC Chat Test. This is what I believe is Old school Group Chat, effectively the predecessor to the Facebook Messenger Group chats. Click “More” to reveal the Interface.

Continue reading “IRC Chat Test” →

Random photos.

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If you live in the UK and your name is “Fergus Young” and you have shopped at Topman Recently and / or you attend(ed) Strodes College , could you please ensure the businesses / organizations you deal with have your correct Email address. At the moment, I’ve suddenly been receiving a deluge of email in my Gmail account clearly intended for someone else (whom happens to have the same name as me) from Shopping Mailers, shopping receipts, Doctors Emails, Appointment Reminder Emails,  Emails from Lecturers from various UK Educational institutions.

Chances are, it’s probably an assortment of email intended for more than one other “Fergus Young” after all, there were at last count, 7 different Facebook accounts for “Fergus Young”, (BTW, none of which are mine because I don’t have a Facebook profile… at least not on the main facebook site)

While I have been advising these organizations of the error (in the hope they will inform the intended Fergus Young to verify their correct email address) and then dutifully deleting such email.  The message often does not get through successfully and misdirected emails usually continue until the Person for which the email is intended for discovers that they aren’t receiving email they believe they should.

Usually it’s a matter of people registering with Google Mail with a middle initial and then forgetting to include the middle initial when giving out their email address (e.g fergus.j.young instead of fergus.young or similar) or the businesses whom they give it to entering it incorrectly in to their systems.