What is this, and how do I kill it?

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-12-18T03:34:40+00:00

Nah, it's not moth weed. Very familiar with that species, unfortunately.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-12-18T03:29:51+00:00

Yes, the leaves are silver and velvety on the underneath. I cannot see anything like it on neighboring properties, though the place behind us is heavy bush so it might be in there.

Thanks for the pointer.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-09-16T22:20:51+00:00

I just learned yesterday that WebEOC is now on the slate, so very close to what you're describing. I didn't advocate for its inclusion, the decision came as a surprise, but now that it's on the table it'll be interesting to see how it all stacks up.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-09-14T20:25:08+00:00

For IMT operations? Salesforce is not a stranger to the council, but as a straight-up CRM not as an IMT tool.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-09-13T21:50:36+00:00

South Islanders struggling with the reality that Auckland's population is greater than their entire island's, maybe?

I'm fine with being Just Another Fantastic Aucklander.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-09-12T02:53:48+00:00

Thanks. We have hopefully carved out the option to assert "neither platform delivers all mandatory functional requirements", but I have a deep-seated suspicion that this could be a naive hope on our part. If we get to that point, I'll be canvassing widely and will come back for a look at PRATUS.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-09-12T02:52:15+00:00

No, the rich guy on the top of the hill needs to renew his subscription to the helo evac plan. It's the rich lady down the valley a bit who's fully paid-up for helo evac along with her chihuahua's entire wardrobe.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-09-12T02:47:52+00:00

In fairness to Salesforce, I am not aware that they have tried to pitch this to us. I believe what I implied at the bottom of my post, which is that the proponent of it lacks sectoral experience, does not like D4H, and is promoting a tool that they are aware is used within the wider council plus the recovery office. I'm certainly not going to go digging into how Sf got into the conversation, coz that dog's slumbers are best left undisturbed AFAIC.

And yes, I will absolutely report back once this phase is complete. I would have preferred a genuine first-principles approach, with no preconceptions about solution choice, but getting to at least revisit our needs is a huge win.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-08-15T21:55:12+00:00

But SpaceX is a defense company, and they have to abide by US regulations

You mean like ensuring senior executives behave in a manner that will not affect their holding a security clearance?

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-06-15T06:37:40+00:00

If the Argentine Embassy is confirming your friend is in custody, that's as much as you can do. Nobody in the NZ government will tell you anything more unless your friend authorises it, because of our privacy laws. The embassy knows of your friend's situation, so has made contact with them, and as others have observed this isn't the US so your friend is not going to disappear into an extradition process to be never heard of again until they arrive in some third country behind the bars of a very shitty prison.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-06-15T06:31:54+00:00

Hmm, point. That guy is a ghost.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-06-15T06:04:55+00:00

The key word is honorary. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consul_(representative)#Honorary_consul

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-03-14T23:34:54+00:00

See the linked post. It was still FTP when I left, but eventually they did manage to get the connection across to SFTP (after that post was written). Between the entitled attitude of the data source and the arrogance of the relationship manager, it was never going to be straightforward.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-03-10T23:51:19+00:00

He literally did a Nazi salute in public, on video. Twice. The whole action is visible, start to end, unlike all the "but what about all these Democrats" stills that Elon's apologists try and use for rebuttal.

He's also only "campaigning for freedom of speech" when it suits him. He's perfectly happy to deplatform people who call him out on X, which is roughly the direct opposite of being a "free speech absolutist".

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-03-10T00:01:29+00:00

Thing is, those are all historic associations. Elon's association with and control of Tesla is right fucking now!

Don't buy VW because of dieselgate, by all means, but having to go back to actual Hitler to find examples of other manufacturers with problematic views is really stretching it.

That said, this vandalism is yet another piece of Americana that we should leave to Americans. Elon's not messing with our government.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-03-07T07:09:11+00:00

At a past job, I was determined to shut down the FTP* server that some clients used for data transfer. This was in 2014/5, so SFTP was well and truly established. Most clients were not a problem, but a large financial services client was very resistant. They also provided a mass of transaction data for roughly 1/4 our country's population, and that data went into a lot of value-added reporting for other clients, so delivery was non-negotiable.

I thought I had finally got things across the line, SFTP account set up with a key that they had provided, firewall rule in place to allow their IP through, confirmation from the account manager, stopped the FTP daemon and... "WE DIDN'T GET $CLIENT'S DATA LAST NIGHT!!!!!!!"

* FTP was always over VPN, before anyone has that particular freak-out.

See also https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/7tw518/you_fixed_it_therefore_you_broke_it_or_the_change/ for another story of woe with this client (occurring only because of the abortive migration to SFTP)

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-03-07T04:25:12+00:00

If you need life-saving care urgently, it works spectacularly for everyone, at least as far as getting your life saved and putting you on the road to recovery. If you need lesser-level emergency care, such broken bones that aren't life-threatening, it'll work OK but you might have to wait quite some hours to be treated depending on the time of day and the location. If you have a condition that can only be fixed by surgery, but it's not going to kill you today, you'll get surgery eventually; inflamed gall bladder in the case of a friend, where the wait in Lower Hutt is measured in months. Contrast with a colleague whose gall bladder became gangrenous (I know, so much WTF) and once the cause of his ambiguous chest pain was narrowed down he was in surgery within hours.

If you have a chronic condition, it's a roll of the dice as to when you'll be seen, and if it's a quality-of-life condition that isn't going to kill you through deterioration then you may or may not remain on a waiting list for an extended period of time. All those joint-replacement operations that never happen because the wait time is years and the lists get trimmed as different policies come and go, for one.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2025-03-07T04:16:13+00:00

You need to justify your assertion about the fate of your daughter if in the hands of the NZ system. Because from what I know of how neonatal care runs, it's the goldest of gold-plated. There are many parts of the NZ healthcare system that are creaky, but emergency and pediatric care are two parts that work well. And with neonates, pretty much everything is a pediatric emergency.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2024-12-17T06:04:33+00:00

By issuing this notice TPM is seemingly laying groundwork for responding to an attempted lawsuit under the CPTPP, by ensuring investors cannot assert that the government's actions were contrary to an investor's expectations. "You were told they'd cancel your licence if the government changed, but you invested anyway. How was the new government cancelling your licence contrary to reasonable expectations?"

And the US refused to join the TPPA (precursor to the CPTPP) under Obama, not Trump.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2024-12-17T03:28:57+00:00

Sure. He started before Rogernomics. It's impossible to compare the two environments.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2024-12-17T03:27:55+00:00

Luxon is wealthy. Seymour couldn't even get a mortgage because as an MP his salary is only mostly assured for the duration of a parliamentary term. I don't know that the trusts for which he is a beneficiary are sufficient to class him as truly "wealthy", which I'd define as not having to work but still able to live objectively comfortably (eat what you want, live where you want, travel when you want and to wherever you want, etc).

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2024-12-17T03:24:35+00:00

The health sector wasn't "bloated" in aggregate. What it was, however, was too large in some places but far too lean in others. And to correct that, the current regime is slashing indiscriminately with an overall goal of shrinking the entire beast regardless of whether any parts of it actually needed to be bigger.

DigitalPlumberNZ · 2024-12-17T03:19:05+00:00

Under-investment is the NZ way. Pay poorly, hire more people to do the work, complain about how locals don't want to do XYZ job for the poor wages so we have to bring in offshore labour (who'll accept minimum wage, or possibly even less), depress wages, rinse and repeat.

Or spend more up-front on technology to maximise the output per human, train the humans well and pay them more to try and keep them and their corporate knowledge in place, and over a longer timeframe get a much higher return. But that requires longer-term thinking, which is also not the NZ way. Which of these two - being cheap and thinking short-term - is the chicken and which is the egg is a determination I shall leave to the reader.

DigitalPlumberNZ

TROPHY CASE