I was making my cup-of-tea at work the other day when a co-worker asks me if he’s seeing correctly.

You use two tea bags ?

Man, I don’t drink tea anymore, do you see the stain it makes on cups? You can’t get that stuff off, worse than coffee.

Can you imagine what it’s doing to your stomach.

I cringe as I “hila” over at the size of his girth.

Kapau pe ne ke inu tii pe ko e ka e fakasi’isi’i hifo ho’o kai, na’e mei sai ange ia ...

/nuff said.

Whale watching is one of those things you find has become a huge tourist attraction for getting visitors into Tonga. Apparently the waters around Vava'u (and to a lesser extent, Ha'apai) are just a magnet for the behemoths to be spending a fair amount of time.

Annah Evington runs tours for visitors to the isles, and you can find her details at: http://www.bluepacificwhalewatching.com.au/ 

Why not? Putting the kids to sleep so Y not use the phone? I prefer a real keyboard, but obviously twitters show there's lot's doing it on the small screen. And someone actually wrote most of a novel (that made money) If I had a real kboard I could see my blogging working more consistently

Tahi Pacifika, what’s up with that ?

Karyn and Boris with the vessel “Lavinuella” are running a new service in Vava’u that anglers, divers and whale watchers might appreciate.

http://www.tahipacifika.com

Doing it with Snorkels

If you’ve dived in clear blue waters (remember the colour of the sea is a reflection of the sky? and sometimes a factor of the enormity of pollution in the area) then you’ll know what Vava’u and Tahi Pacifika have to offer.

If you’re planning the next dive, or fishing trip, head on over to Vava’u and have a great time.

I’m as much a fanboy of Open Source as the next fella, but sometimes the fanboys for Linux, passing themselves off as journalists just don’t make any economic sense.

The Ubuntu Podcast #19 lead me to a blog post “French Lawmakers Hope to Inspire Linux Revolution” from the New York Times?

If the French National Assembly gets its way, the open-source Linux operating system will take over the governments of Europe, seizing on a weak economy to displace Windows.

About 18 months ago, the Assembly shifted from running Windows on the 1,100 computers of its members and their assistants to running a version of Linux called Ubuntu. (I profiled the rise of Ubuntu in a recent article.) According to Rudy Salles, vice president of the assembly, the decision to abandon Microsoft’s Windows software was both an economic and political gesture.

Fanboyish Articles like this really hurts the credibility of the Open Source ‘movement’ even if they do inspire some PR. Dig in and see if you can find assertions by the French Parliamentarians that such a “Linux Revolution” is actually being pushed.

1st (Article dated: January 21, 2009) If the French had known 18 months ago that we would be in the economic down spiral we’re in now, they sure picked the wrong thing to be worrying about (Operating Systems on PCs) and have shown themselves fiscally incompetent and any further discussion in that matter is banal.

Seriously people if the French knew 18 months ago that people would be losing jobs and homes on an unprecedented scale, what were they doing with that knowledge? If I were French it would seem an appropriate time to tear the government down for continuing signs of idiocy.

2nd 500,000 euro saving over 5 years on licensing an OS is such a stupid number. They could have quoted $15 million over 5 years and we’d still have no clue what that number’s supposed to mean. Let alone 500,000 euro being a lot less now than 18 months ago.

Shifting 11,000 PCs already running an OS to another OS seems something only politicians can dream of as fiscally responsible. How much would you consider will be the cost in man hours to complete the installation and reconfiguration of support infrastructure for these 11,000 PCs ?

Just because the OS is free doesn’t mean that it magically puts itself onto all the machines, nor correct itself if somehow the PC is different enough to have unique requirements. And those 11,000 PCs aren’t identical so the variations of installation/configuration is very large.

Oh, but they say that there’s no support overhead (oops, much much lower overhead) for Ubuntu than Windows, and they have all of FIVE (or maybe more) case studies for this too.

Amazing how people who don’t do support, or have even done a valid study of it, can be so authoritative.

3rd Open Source Software is good for the local economy

This is a rich distortion field argument. So, the company that got the contract is somehow not self-serving to state that because Microsoft doesn’t pay taxes in France that it’s better for the local economy to hire his company to roll out solutions. We’ll just ignore the stupid French tax payers who actually make money from using the Microsoft Ecosystem building and releasing products and services. Because obviously they’re not real French people ?

Dude, I can’t stand most Americans speaking in English. I don’t know how the French (as alluded by the post) have been able to stand the Americans providing so much of their training, installations, documentation in Americanised French (or have they all been delivered in American English?)

Ubuntu is a great product, and I use it everyday on my desktop and servers I manage but there are enough limitations on it that I’m more than willing to spend my money and also have a MS Windows machine with purchased software running on it. The above article is just lame, sounds authoritative because its from the New York Times, but could have been much better done.

Just finished reading CJ Cherry’s fantasy/science fiction novel “Hammerfall” and found the book very enjoyable with great imagery as the author weaves a story mixing future generation space travel, genetics overarching a tribal/medieval desert terrain society seeking right and wrong, extremism and survival.

Just trialling our Documents page and have uploaded / tagged a few to show how it easy it is for the content developers, as well as for the end-users.

HarperCollins Review: One of the most renowned figures in science fiction, C.J. Cherryh has been enthralling audiences for nearly thirty years with rich and complex novels. Now at the peak of her career, this three-time Hugo Award winner launches her most ambitious work in decades, Hammerfall, part of a far-ranging series, The Gene Wars, set in an entirely new universe scarred by the most vicious of future weaponry, nanotechnology. In this brilliant novel -- possibly Cherryh's masterwork -- the fate of billions has come down to a confrontation between two profoundly alien cultures on a single desert planet.

"The mad shall be searched out and given to the Ila's messengers. No man shall conceal madness in his wife, or his son, or his daughter, or his father. Every one must be delivered up." -- The Book of the Ila's Au'it

Marak has suffered the madness his entire life. He is a prince and warrior, strong and shrewd and expert in the ways of the desert covering his planet. In the service of his father, he has dedicated his life to overthrowing the Ila, the mysterious eternal dictator of his world. For years he has successfully hidden the visions that plague him -- voices pulling him eastward, calling Marak, Marak, Marak, amid mind-twisting visions of a silver tower. But when his secret is discovered, Marak is betrayed by his own father and forced to march in an endless caravan with the rest of his world's madmen to the Ila's city of Oburan.

Instead of death, Marak finds in Oburan his destiny, and the promise of life -- if he can survive what is surely a suicidal mission. The Ila wants him to discover the source of the voices and visions that afflict the mad. Despite the danger sof the hostile desert, tensions within the caravan, and his own excruciating doubts, Marak miraculously reaches his goal -- only to be given another, even more impossible mission by the strange people in the towers.

According to these beings who look like him yet act differently than anyone he has ever known, Marak has a slim chance to save his world's people from the wrath of Ila's enemies. But to do so, he must convince them all -- warring tribes, villagers, priests, young and old, as well as the Ila herself -- to follow him on an epic trek across the burning desert before the hammer of the Ila's foes falls from the heavens above.

Written with deceptive simplicity and lyricism, this riveting, fast-paced epic of war, love, and survival in a brave new world marks a major achievement from the masterful C.J. Cherryh.

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Ko e ki’i post fakaangaanga atu pe ‘eni, ngaue’aki ‘a e “Windows Live Writer” ke create ‘a e post (hange pe hano fa’u pe open he Word ‘o toki send ki he website.) I guess it works ? Pictures and all.

Can’t leave things alone, and have to piece together a little disinformation of my own.

US needs 'digital warfare force'

The US has set up specialised detachments dealing with IT problems

The head of America's National Security Agency says that America needs to build a digital warfare force for the future, according to reports.

Lt Gen Keith Alexander, who also heads the Pentagon's new Cyber Command, outlined his views in a report for the House Armed Services subcommittee.

In it, he stated that the US needed to reorganise its offensive and defensive cyber operations.

So, the land of the brave and the dead buffaloes, that have openly broken all forms of international law through kidnapping individuals, revoking life, liberty and the pursuit of anything to various groups and individuals in pursuit of “the American Way” is going to expect you and me to believe that all those spy satellites and telecommunication eavesdropping services do not already put them well ahead of every body else on invading not only their own Citizen’s privacy but everyone elses?

Please, …

The worrying problem is the apathy for the real loss of your privacy.

People didn’t move to encrypting their email when they all knew that the US was eaves dropping, now we people’s whole lives on the Internet being assessed and reviewed by the US machine. They’ve been tapping Australian international phone traffic since Woomera, and who knows whether the Australian Government is turning a co-operative blind eye for spying on Australian citizens internal communications.

I wonder what will finally take us over the edge for end-to-end encrypted communications (e.g. email, phone, web browsing, et. al.)

Encrypting your email is so easy these days, but it’s really hard to communicate in an encrypted manner because people find it too ‘difficult’ to use the additional tools to provide this encryption.

Like most people, that wonderful collection of DVDs gathereth dust smudgy fingers, until you get kids.

And then the lifetime of said media plummets to days instead of the vaunted years.

I’m getting tired of trying out trialware that copies some dvds fine and just totally barfs on others. Linux wasn’t doing me any favours either but I’m going back there again with a few things to try:

Routed through: read # this # aloud

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

Installs libdvdcss libraries from medibuntu.  Now to get back to trying out acidrip et. al.

dvdbackup –i /dev/dvd –M –o path-for-storage/

I won’t be burning to disk, since I want to watch them on the computer(s) but apparently the way to get the things back to disk is:

growisofs -speed 1 -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvdrw -dvd-video path-for-storage/MOVIETITLE/

For the truelly insane, or click-click amongst us, Ubuntu’s ‘Medibuntu’ (Multimedia, Entertainment & Distractions in Ubuntu) might be an appropriate distraction. I suppose adding it to your Ubuntu source list is the simplest thing you can do.

We had a confusing question for the kids at Sunday three weeks ago,

What are the Israelites supposed to do to get God’s blessings from the serpent on the stick that Moses held up ?

The kids stared at the Minister’s symbolism, and came up with every answer except that which the Minister wanted. Sometimes the answer to God’s mysteries aren’t so mysterious.

In another place and another time,

Serpents

Kerry Stewart: Do you find that people from Oceania and indigenous people here in Australia, because they have stories that are positive towards snakes, might read Genesis differently, that would influence them?

Jione Havea: Yes, I do hope that people, indigenous people from Australia as well as from the Islands in the Pacific Ocean would have positive readings of the Genesis story. But it's also - I think there's another challenge there, people from outside of our societies need to learn our stories as well, and this is something that I need to confront as an educator; I'm here as a Polynesian teaching a Western story. I think people of the West also need to learn of our stories. But yes, my answer to this question is yes, I hope people from outside of the Western mainstream would bring their stories and allow those stories to help them see the biblical stories in a new light. And this is one of those stories.

ABC Radio had a few questions of their own on snakes and the church, listen to the audio or read the transcript.

dear Talanoa friends, this is a reminder that the deadline for proposals is approaching and i encourage those of you who want to offer presentations to contact me and/or Nasili (nvakauta@stjohns.auckland.ac.nz) with the title, abstract or short description of your presentation. It will be helpful to have an idea of what your presentation is about for the sake of putting together the program. See the “Conch for presentations” at http://sites.google.com/a/nomoa.com/talanoa/talanoa-2009/call-for-papers

The sub-themes for this gathering is “tabu,” “lotu” and “tikanga” and there is room for presentations on topics such as:

• Maori symbols or talanoa that help us understand tabu, lotu, tikanga

• or symbols or talanoa from Samoa, Niue, Rarotonga, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Guam, Tikopia and so forth

• Fa’a Samoa in diaspora
• Vaka viti in diaspora

• and same for other island nations: What are the marks of your island-identities?

• Sacred (tabu) nature of our cultures
• Prohibiting (tabu) nature of our cultures
• Pre-Christian or pre-contact forms of lotu in your island context

• Limits of lotu (traditional, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, etc) in Oceania
• Limiting arms of lotu (traditional, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, etc) in Oceania
• Prohibiting (tabu) nature of our lotu and/or tikanga
• Sacred (tabu) nature of our lotu and/or tikanga

• In what is our future?

• and so forth

I learned that there are cheap fares available online (for travellers from Aust):

Jet Star (http://www.jetstar.com/au/en/cheap-flights/standard.aspx): AUD $183 (this is where you take only a carry-on, so you can bring back mussels from NZ)

Go Fare! with Virgin Blue (http://www.virginblue.com.au/) is AUD $283.73

Air New Zealand (http://sites.google.com/a/nomoa.com/talanoa/) is AUD $386.12

We will subsidize the travel expenses of presenters from outside of Aotearoa North Island who are (1) students or (2) under 25 and 2^nd Gen. You need to let us know if you are planning to make a presentation, and if you book early we can save some of our resources for the 2010 gathering

Look forward to hearing from several of you. And feel free to pass the words around to your friends & relatives

Have a good weekend, Jione