Bear's Blog New Zealand (Beta)

Life without Internet

Wonder how many people from North Island can get online now.

A problem within Vector's fibre network seems to be causing many people in North Island lost internet connectivity for about 7 hours+, started around 12:30pm today. As far as I understand, Country's second and third ISP Vodafone and Orcon are both affected, not so sure about Telecom.

The details are still quite sketchy, however, I suspect the outage is possibly due to our aging infrastructures failed to stand in the bad weather this week?

Seems to be OK now, at least for me.

This is a huge outage and I do expect some sort of explanation, report or compensations for this.

End of an era

Chairman and co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates is retiring today to devote more of his time in his foundation to combat poverty. Read more »

Auckland University switching to Google Apps

Auckland University's email services will be switching to Google Apps next month.

Google Apps is a service most of ordinary users never heard of, but yet it is so popular that some of small site owners just cannot live without it. It provides an integrated solution for small site owners, provide the Google services like Google Chat, Gmail and Google Canlendar to users of those sites, free of charge.

I'm not a very tech savvy person so the Google Apps saved me from all the hassles like manage emails. If somebody is more unsavvy than me, they can even build a whole simple site by using Google Sites.

Compare with old university 100mb storage  (1mb maximum attachment) email system, the Gmail service is just too generous, and it was free in the form of Gmail for quite a long time now. And even better, it is free.

There's only one down side:there will be usual google ads in it. Oh maybe two, another one being the administrators have little control on storages(I think all your emails are now stored on Gmail server）.

I thought people paid enough tuition fee to fund an email service that has no ads on it.  I didn't expect to see this kind of time and money save move on New Zelaand's largest universiy.

It's bit worrying that corporations are becoming more involved in the process of educating our future generation.  I wonder what kind of effect would have on the people who get their business degree in "Fisher and Paykel Appliances Auditorium".

Another worrying bit for more self is that my other bit of life online is now just fell into the hands of Google, yet again. I'm already dependent on lots of google services like Gmail, Google Reader, Calender, Apps, Docs ... they are all good but you just feel you cannot put all your stuff in the hands of one giant corporation.

It may not doing the evil today, but who knows what will happen tomorrow?

How to pass the time in Parliament

I know Parliament debate can sometimes get very boring and making our "hard working" MPs go crazy or fall asleep (David Benson-Pope).

For those who are still struggling to keep themselves awake in the chamber in this harsh winter, this is quite a good way to pass time:

Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej passes the time folding a paper crane during the censure debate in parliament yesterday.(Source:Bangkok Post)

I doubt if Auntie Helen got the skill to fold one of those.

The Chowick seat

The new seat is actually named Botany, but it was proposed to name Howick before, and is bit fun to keep it this way. Read more »

Emm....

Somebody just forwarded me this:

Bad guys really do get the most girls - New Scientist

However, there is a down side of it. Bad guys attract more girls, but it is very difficult to have a long term relationship.

Just little bit of my thoughts.

From evolutionary standpoint I think short relationship is a good thing. If you still remember your sixth form biology, you should be able to recall that all living organisms have only one sole purpose: to pass on the genes.

Short terms can produce a lot offspring.

However, that only applies to the prehistoric society.

In a modern society like the one we got here, more children means more responsibility to the father, thus requiring a lot of energy from the father side to raise those children. However, Men are pretty good at escaping from responsibilities, so that might be OK.

But if a father cannot invest enough resource to his children, they are more likely to fail in this very competitive society.

Now those children have two options: be evil just like their father did, or the genes cease to pass on from there.

I think the first scenario happens more in our society.

Compare with that, good guy  have enough energy and resource to invest on his children, make his children strong and can withstand the competition, thus has a higher chance to pass the genes on.

From genetic point of view, the competition between the good and bad guys is more like a tie, there's no right or wrong strategy for this. It's just a choice between produce very few offspring and help them survive, or many offspring but let the nature(society) to select who survive.

So be good or bad? Your choice.

But based on my common sense, I prefer the "good guy" strategy. Produce offspring requires a lot of energy too:), especially for the mother side, if only a very small fraction of offspring produced can survive, it is not sensible to produce them at a large quantity.

Nah, I haven't been touching my biology book for years, the comments above are just for fun, don't take it seriously.