Open letter to NZRU

So here's what I've thrown together....
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According to your website, "The NZRU is charged with fostering, developing, administering, promoting and representing the game of rugby in New Zealand". I believe reducing the size of the Air New Zealand cup competition in 2010 greatly conflicts with these values. I am a strong supporter of the Manawatu Turbos, but more importantly, I am a supporter of giving more New Zealanders a team they can identify with.

The current make-up of the Air New Zealand cup presents a sound and fair competition whereby residents of all reasonably-populated provinces in New Zealand have a team they can call their own. Super 14 doesn't give this, and the All Blacks even less so. Name one Manawatu player who has played in Super rugby while they represented the Manawatu province. The Hurricanes have turned their backs on Manawatu to such an extent that we no longer even host home games anymore. What's in the Hurricanes for us? Nothing. No players.. No games in our city. We actually don't have a Super 14 team we can support!

Next year, we will see Nick Crosswell, Andre Taylor and Aaron Cruden playing for the Hurricanes and the only reason this has been possible is because their provincial team were exposed to the highest calibre of rugby. These signings would never have happened if Manawatu were in a lesser division. Once a team goes down to a lesser division, the star players and money all disappear. There's no strength to build players to the level needed to appeal to Super rugby franchises. In NZ provincial rugby, when you're down you're really down. You have no All Blacks, no super rugby players, and your own team takes part in a competition where the standard is noticeably poorer.

The NZRU argue that with promotion/relegation the competition becomes meaningful, but I would argue this strongly. In 2003 Hawkes Bay were in division two. They won every single game of their season, including the semi-final and final. Northland were the opposite but in first division. They lost every game and ended up playing Hawkes Bay in the promotion/relegation match. The scene was set to see Hawkes Bay come into division one at last. They played the match in Napier and what happened? Northland demolished them. The result echoed the previous years' promotion/relegation match results. It marked the tremendous gap in standard between divisions one and two. This gap isn't something a team can just bridge in one season. It takes time - much as it has taken time for Manawatu to start playing convincingly in premier division.


While Manawatu have bred a number of All Blakcs in recent years - Lee Stensness, Kevin Schuler, Jason Eaton and Christian Cullen - no player was playing for Manawatu at the time they became All Blacks. This hardly gave us a great deal of satisfaction. Seeing our players who had left the province to harbour better All Black selection prospects being selected to represent New Zealand while our very team was languishing in division two of the NPC was a real kick in the guts, rather than something to bring us pride. The same thing has repeatedly happened to other lesser teams in New Zealand over the years. What do you think that does for a province over time? It's like the brain drain New Zealand is experiencing where skilled workers leave the country for better job prospects. So too do provinces lose skilled players if there is no incentive for them to stay. Premier division is that very incentive.

What I'm saying is not that Manawatu should stay in Premier Division, but that ALL 14 teams should. If you drop any of the 14 teams down into a meaningless competition, you will be giving well-populated provinces no team to relate to.

I do understand the issues over sustainability of the competition, and the length of the season, so I have proposed a few options.

1) Drop the idea of having 'finals'
2) Develop a RWC style 'pool' format
3) Stop giving in to the SA in SANZAR and letting the Super rugby competition keep growing in length without giving any benefit to New Zealand
4) Keep the competition running during the All Blacks' end of year tour. Seriously... you run the Tri Nations during the Air NZ Cup, why must it be finished in time for the end-of-year tour?
5) Leverage the 'cash cow' factor of the All Blacks and use it to fund shortfalls in the Air New Zealand Cup


Name one other sport in New Zealand where people living in one part of the country have to settle for a lesser quality brand than others. Sure, the Air New Zealand cup costs money but how much do the All Blacks bring in every year? Smaller provinces aren't always going to making hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. They are going to have rough patches but one thing is for sure, shoving them down into division two isn't going to do their profitability any good.

"Section 92A"

Most New Zealand artists, musicians, or fans of either will no doubt have heard this phrase being thrown around lately. It is the name of a section of a legislative document that was supposed to become an act in New Zealand law early this year. The legislation is aimed at reducing the problem of illegal downloads in New Zealand, and requires ISPs to implement a policy whereby they cut off the Internet connections of people who download illegal music, videos and the like. Not only this, it also promoted a policy of 'guilt upon accusation' whereby an ISP can cut off your Internet connection, even if you are suspected of downloading copyrighted material.

Well.... so they say. But how many people have actually read the legislation? Does it really say that, or do we have a 'chicken little' situation here?

Lets take a look at the aforementioned section and judge for ourselves:

92A Internet service provider must have policy for terminating accounts of repeat infringers

• “(1) An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer.

  “(2) In subsection (1), repeat infringer means a person who repeatedly infringes the copyright in a work by using 1 or more of the Internet services of the Internet service provider to do a restricted act without the consent of the copyright owner.

The point being hammered by the clan out there is the notion of 'guilt upon accusation'. Well, I'm sorry, but I don't see it. I see the words "in appropriate circumstances", and "repeat infringer". "In appropriate circumstances" suggests that the ISPs won't just be expected to terminate someone's account as a knee-jerk reaction. The phrase "repeat infringers" suggests that there will be a leniancy on the first instance of downloading

The other excuse people haul out is that 'someone who doesn't like them could complain to their ISP and they would lose their Internet connection as a result'. First, I'm not sure what kind of company these people keep but I'd suggest they go and get new friends or take a look at themselves in the mirror if they know there are people out there who would do that. That's a pretty septic thing for someone to do, and I'd say you've got just as much chance of being mugged as you have of someone doing this to you. Nonetheless, lets try running this argument through section 92A and we'll see whether it would lead to a disconnection or not.

“(1) An Internet service provider must adopt and reasonably implement a policy that provides for termination, in appropriate circumstances, of the account with that Internet service provider of a repeat infringer.

So what happens? Joe Asshole phones Joe Paranoid's ISP and says he has been repeatedly downloading illegal music. The ISP does nothing, so Joe Asshole writes to parliament to advise that Joe Paranoid's ISP hasn't been following the law. Parliament investigate Joe Asshole's claim "ISP X have ignored my claim that Joe Paranoid has been downloading illegal music and have failed to meet their obligations under section 92A". Is that all the evidence that they have? Yes. A claim made by someone. Joe Paranoid, to me, is hardly a person worthy of the claim 'repeat infringer'. Are you telling me that an ISP, with all the technology they have available, will make a decision based on a verbal tip and nothing more? Think of the bad press they'd cop if Joe Paranoid went public about it. ISPs need business and not a mass exodus of customers.

As I wrote this, I could almost hear the chicken littles jumping up and down and saying "no no no, you've missed the point. It doesn't have to go before parliament... an ISP can make that call on their own as section 92A gives them that responsiblity." Maybe it does, but how are the government going to know whether they are doing it or not? If an ISP isn't blocking its customers, how is the government to know that they don't just have a bunch of law-abiding customers? The only way there can be any repercussions is if a case goes public and is investigated by the government, and the first thing they're going to do is consider the evidence that an ISP had to work with before making a decision to block or not to block. The phone call of Joe Asshole is not one that would be considered 'appropriate circumstances' for termination of someone's account.

I wish people would stop over-reacting to this. It's bandwagoning gone mad.

Yahoo Customer Care

Ok, this thing has escalated to the point where I can no longer keep it to myself. Yahoo's customer service is poor. I know I'm paying nothing to use their service, but ultimately you get what you pay for don't you?

A few weeks ago I made the decision to migrate my email away from my current Inspire Net email address onto GMail. The reason being that, whilst I do like Inspire Net, their pricing isn't competitive with some other ISPs out there. Yes, they have great service, but how does that help me, the home user, with a bread-and-butter Internet connection, who just wants to save money? They were offering 2Mb ADSL plans for as long as they could. The plan I was on was perfect for me - 10GB/month at 2Mb for $50/month. They have only recently stopped being able to offer such a plan as Telecom apparently won't allow it anymore. I had two choices - either move to fullspeed 10GB/month or 5GB/month. Prices are $57.50/month or $52.50/month respectively. I actually wanted neither of these plans. I wanted what I had. But that was no longer an option. So I have put us onto the $52.50 plan. It sucks, because now I am constantly conscious of how much I download. That's hardly moving forward in Internet use is it?

The thing stopping me from moving my services away from them at the moment is my old email address, so I have opened up a gmail account and have been slowly switching all my lists/groups etc over to using my gmail account. Things went pretty well, and as they come in I am just switching them over to gmail. That is... everything except Yahoo.

Yahoo has an interesting system where you associate an email address with a Yahoo ID. You can set an email address as the primary email once you have verified your email address. That's the part I've been having problems with. The verification email doesn't arrive. It's not my spam filter. I have tried adding 4 different email accounts at 4 different providers, and in no case do I receive the verification email. It's not the spam filter.

So, I emailled Yahoo's customer care to enquire about the problem. They replied, telling me that it was my spam filter. I inadvertently deleted this email along with the tens of confirmation emails I had received from Yahoo during my add/delete/add/delete email address from profile phase, so I couldn't reply to it. Yesterday I decided I'd try again. So I sent them another help request, explaining that i was certain it wasn't my spam filter and that I received the same symptom at 4 different email addressed belonging to 4 different providers. I finished my email by saying "I look forward to having a solution to this problem that doesn't suggest spam filtering". Surely enough, they replied and told me the problem was... you guessed it ... my spam filter.

What a load of rubbish. I emailed them back to clarify the situation a little more and have yet to hear a response. However, in the process I have ended up on a link where I can disavow an email. I disavowed my gmail email address, thinking I was removing it from the Yahoo record. However it turned out I have permanently removed my Gmail account from ever being used by Yahoo, so have totally killed any chance of using it for my alternate email address unless someone at Yahoo customer care decides to feel like helping me rather than spitting out a generic email suggesting it's my spam filter.

I'll keep you posted on the results but I can't see how it's going to have any more success than my past attempts at getting help from them.


I belong to a number of Yahoo groups

My Songwriting Efforts

Some of the long-time readers out there will be aware of my musical background. I've been through a few instruments over the years; piano, saxophone, bass guitar, guitar, drums and vocals. I've played in bands of many genres, and sung in both choral and contemporary contexts. One thing I have not done, however, is write (or even contribute to) a song that gains significant attention. Mostly, this is because my skills as a songwriter are extremely poor. But in my defense, my lack of songwriting credits is due to a lot more than just poor skills. It's also due to a bad choice of instrument. Lets face it, the drums are a lot of things but they sure aren't melodic. I played them steadily for ten years and, without playing an instrument that is capable of surviving on its own merits (eg guitar or keyboards), hardly did myself any favours as far as songwriting goes.

However, in more recent times I have shifted into the city and playing the drums isn't something I can really do without being conscious of upsetting the neighbours. In order to get a musical outlet, I bought myself a guitar a few years ago. Since picking this up again I have discovered a distant remnant of a songwriter that can flog out the odd halfway decent tune just by me having listened to so many over the years.

A well-known fact is my affiliation with the Wellington-based duo Gracious Deviants. A lesser known fact is my contribution to one of their staple tunes 'The Mountain'. The idea for this originated from a song I started on that was based on an unusual interval in the song 'Wildwood Flower' sung by June Carter in the film Walk The Line (about Johnny Cash). In late 2006, I was working on a project at a high school in Wellington. It was a two week job and on the second week I stayed with my brother Darrel. It hardly felt like work when, at the end of each day, I'd come home to beers, party packs, curries and guitars. One night, we were sharing our recent unfinished songs and I attempted to re-inact my Wildwood Flower rip-off. Somehow, it got Darrel's attention and we then set to work at putting some meaningful melodies and chords either side of it. Before long, we had the basis of a pretty decent chorus. What was missing was a final wrap up. The answer came courtesy of Jon Hume from Evermore. I had been listening to a lot of them at the time, and so I sang a line that I imagined him singing. At that point, it all came together. We had a chorus with an unusual 5-chord sequence and a catchy melody. The harmonies were a breeze, as was the verse.

The only thing left to do was to get Pete to give his polish to it to turn it from a 'Greaney brothers garage special' into a "Gracious Deviants song". I don't think anyone was too sure about what was going to happen next. Pete heard the song and liked it, and the rest is history.

It's now well over halfway through 2008 and it has taken until now for me to be able to present my efforts. Visit the Gracious Deviants' Myspace Page and go listen to 'the mountain' for a taste of what I think is my most monumental songwriting contribution. Lets see those plays going up :)

Never trust a GUI

As the 5 regular readers will be aware, I have been playing with Ubuntu 8.04 lately and have been having some troubles with the wireless setup. On the weekend, I decided I was going to sort it once and for all. I decided forget using a GUI to configure a troublesome piece of software. The problem Linux has it that it was built on a command line first and foremost. Many of these core tools still exist today and form the basis of a solid working OS. What a GUI overlay tool has to do is write to a text file then control a command-line daemon. Both these tasks are things that a human and a shell script can handle quite well together without the need for a GUI to interfere with things. On the weekend, I decided I should stop trying to fight the city hall and just use the damn command-line tools necessary for getting a wireless card working.

Well.. I did it. It required a lot of effort though. First, I can't have a hidden SSID on my wireless AP. I haven't yet confirmed this by turning it off, but I'm a bit scared to at the same time. Second, the wpa_supplicant process doesn't work in daemon mode without some adjusting of priority. It's really weird. I could associate with my AP using wpa_supplicant and have it debug to the console, but as soon as I ran it in daemon mode, i couldn't get an IP address using dhclient. Crazy huh? But what would you know, I read a post by a guy who had the same problem as I did and found that by running nice -19 to set the priority of wpa_supplicant in daemon mode, he was able to get it working. I tried it and voila, I too was finally enjoy painless wireless under Linux.

I did have to fully modify wpa_supplicant.conf so it has all the credentials for the ap (even an encrypted form of the WPA passphrase) but yeah, it works.

Ok... Maybe for my next post I'll do something a bit more human readable.

Wireless is holding Linux off the desktop

Last week, I posted a brief review of my recent experience installing Ubuntu 8.04. I am a seasoned Linux engineer and have been a user since 1999. Having been there and battled pretty much every aspect of the Linux desktop over the years, I was very much in awe as I came to grips with the fundamentals of the Ubuntu desktop. I still want to play with KDE 4 but can't justify the 200+ MB download at the moment (yes, New Zealand still has this pathetic concept of a 'monthly data cap' which I gather overseas countries often don't.

What I have since discovered, I am afraid, is not good. Linux's implementation of wireless. The nicest thing I can say about it is..... that it's absolutely one of the clunkiest pieces of rubbish I have used on the latest version of Ubuntu and it is so convoluted that Linux won't make it any further until they do something about it. There. I think I pretty much summed it up.

Let me describe my configuration:
Wireless NIC: Linksys WMP54GS (Broadcom 4306 chipset)
WPA2 enabled
SSID hidden

Nothing too unusual here, I would have said. Ahh... but it is. You see, a driver for the Broadcom chip hasn't been written for Linux. So to install, I have to use the same tool I used when I tried Linux on the desktop last year - the Broadcom 43xx Firmware Cutter (bcm43xx-fwcutter). A clever creation but, with no GUI available, there is no way this process could be made a part of the installer. So anyway, off I go, cutting the firmware from the Windows driver and reading up on how to configure my system to use the newly extracted firmware. How? Well, under Windows of course. I use wireless and, like a great deal of machines these days, wireless is the only network I have available. So I have to reboot, read, reboot, try, reboot, read, reboot, try. Slow, frustrating, and certainly nothing I'd expect a 'desktop user' to cope with.

Well over a period of 3 hours of this, I learn that not only does Linux not have a nice wifi stack, it also has worse documentation on using it. In fact, the best documentation can be found on message boards. Someone posts the problem they are having, and someone else answers it. How did the guy who answered it get to know the answer? More importantly, how had the developers of the software envisaged people would learn if they don't believe in documenting it?

So eventually, I realise that I am better off using GNOME network manager to add my wireless profile. I can't save it, though. It doesn't work if I try to connect that way. I have to type it the SSID and associate with the access point every time. No other way works for me. This means each time I reboot, I have to set up my wireless.

I post this onto the official Ubuntu IRC chatroom, and I am promptly advised to try WICD as a drop-in replacement for NetworkManager. Alright then, lets do it. NetworkManager is uninstalled, WICD is installed. And that.. my friends... is the end of my wireless connection. You see, no matter what I try, I can't get WICD to even come close to associating with my access point. I give up and go to bed.

The next day, I connect to my access point on my laptop running good old, never-looked-more-desirable-than-now Windows XP and turn ON the SSID broadcast, hoping that this might give me more joy with my other computer and WICD. WICD detects the AP. Great. Except it won't associate with it. I go to read the help for WICD and, unsurprisingly, there appears to be none. Alright, time for it to go. At least NetworkManager got me online some of the time. So I head back to Synaptic to install NetworkManager, but it doesn't work. Why? It wants to go online of course!!! GRRRRR I then head for the Ubuntu installation CD, but that doesn't work either. This time, it's nothing to do with poor documentation or incomplete programming. My 14 month-old son has been biting the disc and has rendered the 600+MB squashfs file containing the .deb packages unreadable.

It's off to Windows I go. I download both .deb packages for NetworkManager, reboot, then install. This time it does something different - it tries to automatically connect me to my access point. Great! This must be what happens when the SSID is being broadcast. Hmm... no IP. Try it again, then again, then again. Still nothing. I try doing it the manual way that had worked for me in the past. Nope. Nothing. For crying out loud. So back to my laptop, turn OFF SSID broadcasting, go to connect with NetworkManager the way I had before and... you guessed it... it worked.

In other words, my stupid round trip from NetworkManager to WICD to WICD with SSID on to NetworkManager with SSID on ended up exactly where it started - at a frustrating compromise of a wireless setup that requires manual intervention any time I want to go online. All this just means another reason why I won't be bothered booting into Linux and will just end up using Windows.


I can accept that wireless on Linux may still be immature. However, what annoys me about it is that there is bugger all useful documentation out there about it, and the software is unfinished. The really frustrating part about it is that it does seem there are two different 'wireless experiences' out there to be had in Linux world. Either a really nice seamless elegant one, or a downright awful one. Let me quote an article from Linux.com about it and you'll start to understand this a little bit more:

One of the greatest new features for laptop users in Ubuntu is network-manager. With this shiny new application it is finally easy to connect your Ubuntu system to any wireless network.

It is? Hmm. Could have fooled me.

Where previously you had to jump through hoops to do WPA or 802.1x authentication, network manager makes this completely transparent.

Oh god, please, spare me the crap already!! So you had to previously jump through hoops... as opposed to now where you have to............ ?


Ubuntu is touted as being 'Linux on the desktop' and Debian (as in Debian GNU/Linux) is often criticised for being slow on the uptake. Well I'll say this right now. Wireless networking was a challenge under Debian, I have no doubt about it. But it was a damn sight better than Ubuntu with the same hardware. A hacked copy of Mac OSX runs wireless on a PC so much better than Linux does and to me that's just wrong.

Wireless needs to do one of two things. Either get good, or at least develop documentation to help struggling people get their wireless setup online. Remember, wireless is the sole means of network access for a great number of users today.

Please can we get with the times?

Continuing Mankind Costs More Than Letting it Subside

This one has been on my mind for a while now. Before I get seriously into things, I'd like to point out that the 'world' I speak of is New Zealand. Beyond our shores, I have no idea how things work in the areas I am about to discuss.

As readers here may or may not be aware, I am a father of a 14 month-old son. Being a father has amazing benefits, don't get me wrong, but it also has some major challenges. Money, health and sleep and probably the three biggest thus far. One of the decisions affecting most couples when they decide whether or not they are going to have children is, of course, the money. Some people might be alarmed to hear that the biggest cost of having young children is actually not the children themselves but the lack of income for the parent who stays at home to look after the child. As a family's income drops, their entitlement to the government Working For Families increases. From $0 per annum up to about $35000 per annum, you get quite a nice entitlement. From there onward, things get a lot less fruitful. Above $50000, you really need to start seriously considering whether it's worth the paperwork to apply since what you get from them doesn't really provide much useful assistance.

Last year, I got made redundant by my previous employer. I received a redundancy settlement that was rather generous, and was also in the fortunate predicament of having a new job handed to me on a plate. Redundancy is normally intended to protect those people who have been made redundant while they search for new work, so in my case it was all a big fat bonus. However, given the unsettling and stressful environment I had worked in for the previous 12 months, I have no qualms about accepting it as a partial payback for everything I and my colleagues had suffered. But.... according to the IRD, redundancy is also considered 'income'. This pushed our annual income up to such a point that we were no longer elligible to receive anything for that financial year from Working for Families. Again... probably not unfair given that we did, let's face it, actually receive a lot of money that year. However, it does start to become what people might consider unfair when you remember that other people who I work with who don't have dependent children were able to pocket all of their redundancy money while I used a large amount of mine to supplement what the government would have paid us in Working for Families income. If I hadn't done this, we wouldn't have been able to live. It's that simple.

So who is the winner in this situation? The guy who chose not to have children of course.

Children get sick a lot. Young children, more so, because their immune system hasn't yet built up resistance to anything really. So every cold, cough, virus or whatever that is out there to be caught, Daniel catches if he is exposed to it. He brings it home and, in all likelihood, one of his parents will catch it. If I catch it, then I have to take time off work. If Stacey catches it, she can't take time off 'work' since she doesn't have an employer as a stay at home mum. So who covers her? Either a) Nobody; or b) Me. Either outcome sucks.

When a young child is unwell, the first thing to suffer is usually their sleep. So, if Daniel has a rough night (by that, I mean he won't sleep and at 2am we end up taking him to hospital then returning home at 4am, for those of you who think you know what a 'rough night' is) then we emerge the next morning both feeling like trash and, quite frankly, in no state to work let alone drive. So what's meant to be my next move? Drive to work, unsafe, and be totally useless at work... or stay at home and take a day off? What about Stacey, what's her next move? a) Stay at home, useless, while her equally useless husband goes to work; or b) Stay at home, useless, while her equally useless husband stays home as well and chews through another precious day of annual leave? How does an employer feel about someone not coming in to work purely because they had a terrible night's sleep?

Next question.. How much annual leave do I get per year? 4 weeks. How much sick leave? 5 days. How much time do the rest of the guys at work get? 4 weeks/5 days. Who's the winner here? Again... the guy who chose not to have children.

And I can almost hear people reading this now thinking "Hey man, you're the one who chose to have children so quite ya moaning!". Again... a fair point to make. But consider the impact if people didn't do that? Quite simply, in a nutshell, there would eventually be no humans left in the world. Now, I for one believe there need to be some population growth controls introduced into this world. After all, the planet is only so big and we can't just keep growing infinitely pretending that we don't realise this. But I do also think that those who have children need to receive SOME more benefits than Not Working For Families (as I like to call it). At the moment, people could be understood for choosing not to have children because of the inherent cost involved. Maybe this is one reason why the average age of a mother of a newborn in 2007 was 35. At that stage, at least one parent would hopefully be making a fair amount of money and therefore they could afford it.

Parenting is a great experience and I wouldn't go back to being a 'person' (rather than a father) ever. However, I do think that a lot more could be done to make the experience more relaxing when you lie in bed at night.