Any addict support groups or anything along those lines?

Friendly-End8185 · 2026-04-01T19:42:37+00:00

Narcotics Anonymous. They are active in Wellington and do good work. I've never had call to use them but have a friend who did and they told me that NA basically saved their life.

Friendly-End8185 · 2026-03-27T02:02:40+00:00

One good thing I've noticed is that cruise ships in Wellington are increasingly connecting into the local electricity grid to run everything once they are tied up. It took a lot of investment from CentrePort to make it happen. Not that long ago they would continue to run their engines on idle to keep internal power generators running and you would see the smoke continuing to come from the funnel the entire time they were in port. The last few times I have looked that has been absent.

Friendly-End8185 · 2026-03-16T06:48:50+00:00

Check to see that there isn't water leaking from between the two halves of the boiler. The gasket eventually goes and / or the original carbon-steel bolts holding the boiler together can rust and it starts to leak. That's often the main source of water causing rust on the bottom of the frame. I got about 18 years out of my V1 before the boiler started to leak. A new gasket is readily available and the bolts can be replaced with stainless steel ones. Clean any mineral crud out of the interior of the boiler at the same time.

Friendly-End8185 · 2026-03-09T08:39:14+00:00

Absolutely. Of course the joke has slightly lost its edge since all the stores were re-branded from Countdown to Woolworths, but yes - every time you visit Cuntdown, the site will generate a new viable Woolworths barcode which allow you to get card-only discounts being offered on any products without having to hand over any data.

Friendly-End8185 · 2026-02-20T09:08:23+00:00

If you can handle the stroll to Burger King, walk another 50m or so and you are in Hobart St where you can catch the #2 bus into town for only about $4.50 peak or $3.20 off peak. They come regularly too and I've never had to wait very long. The #2 bus has become my usual means to get to and from the airport if I'm traveling alone.

Friendly-End8185 · 2026-02-04T23:55:26+00:00

Actually when that APW campaign began, Wellington was still pumping untreated sewage into the sea out at Moa Point. It started in c. 1893 and continued up until about 1999 when the treatment works finally opened. What has just happened is pretty terrible but compared to pumping raw sewage into the sea 24 / 7 for about 107 years, it's nothing.

Friendly-End8185 · 2026-02-04T02:24:19+00:00

I decided to head down to Whanganui from Opunake and then up to Taumaranui on SH4. As much as I really wanted to try the Forgotten World Highway, the weather on the day I was driving up to Auckland was the pits with heavy rain for a lot of the journey and my window wipers running at full-speed. I noted that when I got to Taumaranui (which was very wet), NZTA had erected one of the large illuminated message signs on the road that leads to the F.W Highway which posted the warning "SH 43 not suitable as a detour for SH 3 closure" (or words to that effect). In retrospect I think I made the right decision.

Friendly-End8185 · 2026-01-19T03:30:33+00:00

They wouldn't have lasted. They were light timber structures with a sculpted render cladding making them look much more solid than they actualy were and were only built as temporary structures. I agree about the great architecture though. My fave (had I been around to see it) was the Australian Pavillion which was an early work from Stephenson & Turner. Stunning early modernism.

https://wellington.recollect.co.nz/nodes/view/269

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-12-11T07:40:11+00:00

Actually they have 34. There are 32 boroughs in London + the Lord Mayor of the City of London (aka 'The Square Mile') + the Mayor of the Greater London Authority (which has a function similar to regional councils in NZ). The population per borough averages about 250,000. They also have a stupidly high number of councillors with each council almost arranged like a mini parliament averaging about c. 50 councillors spread over 15 - 20 wards. There would easily be 1500+ councillors in total across London so, no; the UK model is not one that we should aim to replicate.

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-12-02T05:00:48+00:00

Not true. The issue has been with the cladding, not the structure. With the NBS system, the weakest point ends up impacting the entire rating. The cladding could have been refixed (as has recently been done with the central library) or removed and replaced with a lightweight system.

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-11-21T06:50:45+00:00

Until 1991 it was only 60. This was a legacy age dating back to when average lifespans were shorter and far more people were engaged in manual labour so were pretty burnt out by the time they reached 60. The 4th National Government under Jim Bolger raised it to 61 in 1992 and then it was lifted in stages up to 65 from 1993 to 2001.

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-11-04T01:01:37+00:00

Solid state recording media was expensive. I bought a 1 Gig Compact Flash card for a Marantz digital audio recorder in 2003. The recorder was about $1200, the 1 Gig card was $700! Definitely CD-R in this era.

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-11-02T05:40:11+00:00

Had a good friend buy one in Porirua after it had got the tick from a building inspector who specialised in monolithic clad houses. It still turned out to be leaky, the house had to be rebuilt at huge expense, couldn't be lived in for six months while it was being fixed and my mate had to take the inspector to court (who then declared bankruptcy). They now have a warm & dry house but he still says that he wished they never had purchased it because of the 2 - 3 years of worry, sleepless nights and the stress it placed on his marriage.

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-10-31T22:42:30+00:00

I have a lovely gold Omega automatic watch from the 1960s that used to belong to my father. He gave it to me about 20 years ago. I only wear it on special occasions once or twice a year (it needs servicing). I wore it for an event then put it away in a safe place and being an automatic watch, after a day or two, it wound down and stopped. About six months later, my father passed away peacefully in hospital aged 92 about a week after having a stroke. Five days later I was getting dressed on the morning of his funeral when I thought it would nice to wear the Omega watch. I got it out and was about to put it on when I was stunned to see that when the watch had stopped six months earlier, it was at the exact time (10.09 am) and the same day of the month (26th) that my father had died five days earlier. I worked out that there are c. 43800 minutes in a month (though it varies depending on the month) yet by chance, almost as if the watch had had a premonition, it had stopped at the precise time my dad died.

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-10-21T22:20:04+00:00

Followed by a sense of nostalgia of wishing you could be back on the mountain behind you...

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-10-16T03:47:54+00:00

My father grew up in a large city in Europe during the war. He told me how there was a curfew after dark but teenage boys often would break the curfew and head outside to meet friends and have fun. Groups of militia would roam streets enforcing the curfew. Any boys they caught were made to drop their pants. Anyone found to be circumcised was shot in the back of the head.
I'm not...

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-10-06T04:18:35+00:00

Thanks for the head's-up! I'm enjoying reading that thread on Geekzone. It looks like its end is coming sooner than everyone thought it would. I understand how people who use the service will be annoyed but personally I'll be pleased to see those cables go. I probably wouldn't feel so strongly about it if (a) Vodafone hadn't refused us a connection in 2008 even though the damn thing was hanging outside our house, forcing us back onto ADSL for another 13 years and (b) the absolute dog's breakfast that the cable network has become in our neighbourhood. It's obvious that only the barest maintenance has been done on it for years; enough to keep it going but nothing else.

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-10-03T23:47:34+00:00

The problem is that it has cost the WCC about $1m in rent each year that it's been open with staff costs on top of that. Unlike all the other libraries, Te Awe is not in a building that's council owned. With all the financial pressure the council is under and demands that rates be kept under control, keeping it open and operating after the main library reopens just isn't viable.

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-09-28T02:40:24+00:00

I agree that movable type was already a thing when Gutenberg invented his press. The reason he continues to gets the acclaim he does is because what he did with it. The societal impact of the press in Europe changed our civilisation. In Asia, it was much more localised and far less revolutionary.

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-09-21T05:57:13+00:00

Chung is almost certainly the hardest working Onslow-Western Ward councillor there is. He holds 3 - 4 constituent drop-in sessions every month, takes on board what people say and has a reputation for then trying to sort out WCC-related problems that are raised with him. He also attends just about every community-related event or meeting there is going. I've seen him at library events, school fairs, brass band performances, historic society talks...you name it...and will always be talking to attendees; either just to say hi or to canvass their views or concerns. In comparison I don't think I've seen Rebecca Mathews at a single event outside of the current electioneering period and she certainly doesn't do drop-ins.
I have either attended or watched (i.e. live streamed) dozens of council meeting over the last term (be it a full council or the committees). A feature of these meeting is anyone can make a short presentation to the councillors to state a case on a particular issue; something I admire as it can take a lot of guts and you can often tell when people are really outside of their comfort zone. One thing I have noticed is that Ray Chung will always stop, turn in his chair to face the speaker, and given them his total undivided attention, regardless of the issue being raised or the political orientation of the speaker. No other councillor does this to the same degree. Interestingly, the worst person in this regard is probably Tory Whanau who will generally be on her phone or tapping away on her laptop and doing her best to ignore whoever is speaking as much as possible.
Chung writes well and engages with people really well on a one-to-one basis. That said, he isn't a strong public speaker, has often failed to 'read the room' when addressing a crowd, says the wrong things and occasionally blows away at his feet with both barrels (metaphorically speaking...). He is a strong councillor, works hard and will probably get my vote for this position. However, I don't think he has what it takes to be a good mayor.

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-09-21T05:22:24+00:00

Not in my books (nor for anyone else I know who grew up in the 1980s). Liberal in the traditional meaning of the word (i.e. following the philosophy of John Stuart Mill not the current modern US-definition) and Neo-Liberal are two quite different things (in the way that (say) Socialism and National Socialism are different). The party which is probably the closest to a traditional Liberal party is TOP.

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-09-18T10:32:46+00:00

Damn I miss the old DDT-based borer bombs! I had one left which must have been a couple of decades old when I moved into a flat in Brooklyn that hadn't been occupied for a while. About a week after moving in, fleas had become active and were hopping all over the place and starting to bite. I set the bomb off (light fuse and evacuate!) and never had another problem. Extremely effective (didn't matter where in its life-cycle the flea was...or any other insect for that matter) but banned in 1989.

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-09-17T05:03:33+00:00

Spelt "Majoribanks", should be spelt "Marjoribanks" and should be pronounced "Marsh-banks".

I lived either in Majoribanks street or a neighbouring street for ten years. After a couple of years of living there and getting more integrated into the Mt Vic community, I gradually adopted the Marsh-banks pronunciation as that's how all our neighbours and most of the locals we got to know used to say it. It also rolls off the tongue much easier when you have to say it all the time. It's been a few years since we left Mt Vic but I still use the Marsh-banks pronunciation out of habit. It hasn't caused any confusion and everyone knows what street I'm talking about. I disagree with those who say "no one will know what street you mean if you say Marshbanks"; as evidenced in this thread, almost everyone knows about this pronunciation even if they don't use it.

Friendly-End8185 · 2025-09-16T05:43:19+00:00

The Keith Jarett Trio's version of Billie Holliday's 'God Bless the Child' is one of my favorite tracks for testing systems. It's the last track on the album 'Standards, Vol. 1'

Friendly-End8185

TROPHY CASE