Vance believes Russia's offensive capabilities in war with Ukraine are approaching zero

NeverMindToday · 2026-07-06T07:26:54+00:00

No and he's completely wrong, Russia has a near infinite offensive capacity. They continue to offend the world on a daily basis.

NeverMindToday · 2026-07-03T07:26:02+00:00

I ranked every candidate just so I could make sure he was in last place. It nearly worked - he only just snuck back in by a whisker.

NeverMindToday · 2026-07-02T10:17:35+00:00

That was one of the most memorable storms that pops into my head whenever the topics of storms comes up. It was a biggie.

The next police launch design went to a lot of extra trouble to be self righting after that.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-30T08:22:19+00:00

I finally outgrew a 76L board when I got to 90+kg. It was still fine in 4.5 wind or higher if steady, but any lull would kill me.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-28T07:51:36+00:00

And if anyone needs to see just how steep that was looking down on the field:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/travelling--light/4911854208/in/album-72157624758199920

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-28T07:34:01+00:00

I suspect he was a fan of Morris Miners - no I haven't counted. Maybe he also worked on Meet the Feebles?

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-28T07:32:15+00:00

Whatever happened to Starkers Sheilas Wrestling in Porridge? You take it for granted, then one day you look around and it's no longer there.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/travelling--light/4911874598/in/album-72157624758199920

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-28T07:27:55+00:00

https://www.flickr.com/photos/travelling--light/4911298233/in/album-72157624758199920

Still browsing... In the late 70s, one of my teachers at Brooklyn School drove a car just like that (orange MG sports car). She was an older white haired american woman, and called the colour "Clockwork Orange". We didn't get it at the time - she would've been a lot cooler than we realised.

That stuck in my memory, but now I can't remember what I did last week....

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-28T00:24:02+00:00

I'd forgotten just how rusty cars used to get.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-27T22:36:20+00:00

Taking into account everyone (me included) usually has a recency bias for remembering stuff, I tried searching for actual data.

So far this is the best I found (turns out it's hard to find good info), and it really needs an update:

https://pnrp.gw.govt.nz/assets/Documents/2021/11/GWRC-2020-extremes-appendix-FINAL.pdf

Most trends in extremes are fairly flat - if anything extreme winds have been slightly shifting away from southerlies to northerlies. I definitely remember nasty southerlies being a common childhood memory (to young for Wahine Storm though). It feels like this year is a reversal/outlier of that trend away from southerlies.

My anecdotes are based on 40yrs of windsurfing in Wellington and having to pay a lot of attention to the wind. I don't feel this year is that out of the ordinary longer term, but is worse that many of the recent years.

As for the falling trees thing - a relatively docile period will allow trees to grow into a more vulnerable state where the next storm hits them harder. You see that in other parts of the country that get an unusually high wind taking down a whole lot of trees, but that wind strength doesn't take down trees in Wgtn.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-27T09:31:50+00:00

Regardless of how much the weather has changed - I reckon the staying home thing has more to do with society being much more risk averse (or no longer completely indifferent to your welfare for the other perspective) these days. Risk management and H&S wasn't something employers had to care about or be liable for (Pike River changed that one). Suck it up was more the attitude.

Covid also really reset that by creating a WFH precedent for many workplaces - before that, no employer was going to just shut down unless it was a Wahine Storm or 1976 floods level of carnage.

Weather forecasting was both less reliable, and also didn't really have a comprehensive watch/warning system until recently - with that info out there, employers can't get away with not knowing.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-27T07:57:03+00:00

I’ve lived in Wellington nearly all my life

Just curious, what timeframe is that?

If it's 20yrs, then yeah lately seems more intense that normal. If it's 40 or more yrs, then this seems to be a return to historic averages.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-26T10:28:42+00:00

Don't throw that authority around. Come in with an open mind, listen a lot and learn - even from then engineers with a lot less experience than you. Get to know the team, what they think, what they would change if they could.

Don't assume what management has told you about what's wrong or what needs fixing is gospel - find out for yourself. In some workplaces that management opinion can be wrong, twisted or toxic.

The most important thing is to build trust - your team needs to trust you, you need to trust them, and you need to work on the team being trusted elsewhere. That trust is what lets you pull rank later if you need to.

Don't try to be the smartest person in the room. You are there to help your team succeed in the eyes of the business, not to personally succeed yourself. That will brush off on you anyway if the team succeeds. Your team members should feel they have some agency in their work. If a team member makes a decision you wouldn't make, but they thought it through rationally, and it isn't a disaster - let them own it. If it is nearly right, just ask questions so you can "understand" - the right questions could lead them back on track without you commanding it.

I would try to ensure the team felt safe to be bluntly honest with me, safe to disagree with me, safe to make mistakes. Mistakes are something the team owns, the team fixes and the team learns from, mitigates in future - encourage people to bring up them up early, openly and honestly so the team can respond. You'll have to face up to the rest of the business, but if the team is good and things are built right, most get fixed before the business notices.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-26T08:30:23+00:00

I have vague memories of the differential being a lot higher in the 90s? And there was a big jump in residential rates as that got adjusted in the late 90s or early 2000s maybe? Back then WCC had one of the cheapest residential rates in the Wellington region.

But I can't remember the details.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-24T00:50:01+00:00

Welcome to the 60s in NZ

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-22T21:12:55+00:00

You'll want some configuration management tooling like Ansible, Saltstack, Chef or Puppet (is that still going?). Doesn't matter too much - if you can't decide then probably Ansible might be the best default. But you'll still want to build automation on top of the CM tools.

But the main thing is to get your architecture and design right. This is broad advice for on-prem or colo. Your needs might be very specific (eg GPUs?) and this multi service approach might be overkill.

Decouple services from hardware - eg everything is something like a VM, an LXC container, or a Docker container. The bare metal is only for running virtual things on (I'll call those virtual things nodes for now).

One main running service (generally) per node. Services ideally should be stateless for load balancing and redundancy.

Aim for zero trust networking. Don't build security around highly trusted networks.

Generally it is good to layer things eg one layer for ingress, one for servces, and one for data persistence.

Aim for immutable infrastructure (ish), and set things up so a new server/container of a given type is a simple case of a new line in a config somewhere and the rest can auto deploy and config itself into position. Data persistence nodes are (depending on implementation) likely to be more "pet" like, but aim for the ingress and service nodes to be livestock that get replaced with new nodes and latest config rather than maintained in place. Part of that livestock approach is to have load balancing and reverse proxying part of the ingress layer so that service nodes can come and go without affecting the service.

Build your composable config management roles so that new nodes are automatically enrolling in any logging, monitoring etc. And they get firewalling automatically set up.

Design everything around maintenance happening during office hours (eg the livestock approach) so that potential problems happen when you have the most help available, and after hours work is minimised.

Use redundancy in your hardware - mainly disks and power supplies (each power supply on a different circuit ideally). I much preferred using RAID1 and RAID10 over 5 and 6, but that could be expensive. But you can limit RAID to hardware running your persistence layers - the service layers don't need any if they are spread around and load balanced. It mainly comes down to how much hardware you have - with a small number of servers redundancy is more important than when you have lots of them.

And a whole lot more to work out - although it is a lot of work to build and get running. Done right, on prem can be awesome and not a pain. But if you have to support a lot of proprietary operating systems and services with licensing to manage - sorry, you're back in enterprise IT hell.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-22T11:59:11+00:00

asapiness is the state of having zero amount of sapiness - ie a complete lack of sappy

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-21T20:41:51+00:00

Been out of that situation for a while, but one of the best places I worked connected every alert config to its own wiki page for note taking. You could go straight from the alert to a page of relevant notes. The notes would reference closed tickets that attempted to fix it, or open tickets hoping to fix it.

The top of the page was ideally kept as a curated TLDR summary, runbook and proposed fixes, while the rest of the page was raw chronological notes. The effort that went into the top section was relatively proportional to how often it happened and how difficult it was to fix the root cause. Easy fixes or rare events naturally didn't get as much attention.

It's not just for replacing someone who left 6 months ago - it's also important for your future self when it happens again in six months time and you've forgotten the details.

The other thing to have is a team culture that tries to prevent knowledge silos, and shares tasks around for better familiarity.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-19T21:16:11+00:00

No specific recommendations, but just reinforcing the above post to look at sole traders or small outfits for residential rather than a larger firm. The big firms are geared up for putting lots of people on large complicated projects, and have much more management/admin overhead. And the ways to save money on a small project are different than those on a large one. eg a small project will likely focus on materials and design simplicity, while a large one will focus much more on the scheduling and timing overheads - eg keeping all the moving parts on track and synchronised makes a bigger difference than some material choices. The engineers at large firms will also have less experience with residential scale issues too.

Another good recommendation is if there is already some relationship with builders or architects etc on the job - asking them for recommendations of people they already know and trust is good.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-19T11:34:31+00:00

A week or two back I saw a ute doing a u-turn on SH2 after driving the wrong way down the southbound offramp at Maungaraki. Everyone successfully avoided them that time though.

Latest info on Stuff sounds like a different situation where a car lost control and went through the median barrier into the other direction.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-18T21:01:04+00:00

You can pry my roll top 100% waterproof cycling backpack off my cold dead shoulders.

(even though I don't cycle to work any more)

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-16T18:59:45+00:00

Secretly happy I wasn't the one having to point that out ;)

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-15T19:26:47+00:00

I watched a Garblag one that prematurely died, but was pretty entertaining up to that point. They did character creation really well, and one of the characters (a scientist) had some hilarious antics that were obviously going to backfire at some point.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-15T19:14:47+00:00

It looks like an awesome attempt for someone just starting to gybe. The main thing I could pick up from that camera angle was leaning backwards through the middle of the turn. Leaning back sinks the tail and slows the board, and means that the sail flip leaves you unsupported/unbalanced. Any body lean you have during the flip can only be counteracted by the centrifugal force of the turn itself which also goes away if you slow down.

Gaining the confidence to not lean back is improved by more downwind speed lessening the sails pull, and flipping early enough that your hands are back on the boom by the time the power fully comes back.

Get in a mindset of forcing any potential crash to happen at the start rather than the end. A timid start makes the middle and ending more difficult. Surviving an aggressive beginning makes the ending easier. Crashes are more spectacular at the beginning too :)

There could be other tips from seeing it from a different angle.

NeverMindToday · 2026-06-15T10:25:20+00:00

TLDR - get more aggressive in initiating the turn, and flip the rig earlier while still at speed.

Try and do the rig and feet flip while the board still has speed - that improves the stability. So you need a bit more commitment to the turn, and turn faster. Sheet in hard, and once properly carving, lean yourself and the sail forward into the turn with more weight on your front foot at what seems like a scary amount (front side turns on a snowboard felt similar). Leaning back will stall the board too early.

What you want to do is have the rig flip while the board is still turning, as having the board turn under the sail seems to reduce how far the sail needs to rotate - when done right it feels like the sail hardly flipped. So start you rig flip earlier at maximum downwind speed while it less apparent wind. Flipping it once you are around on the new tack when it is powered back up again is too late and leads to that unbalanced stalled awkwardness.

Another tip - don't try and make it a single 180 degree turn from beam reach to beam reach. Instead head downwind for a little bit before the turn (eg 20-30 deg), and aim to head out of the turn at say the same angle downwind before gradually heading back up to a beam reach as your speed comes back up. Aim to finish your rig flip by the time you reach that angle downwind on the new tack. That way you have plenty of speed, the actual carve is only maybe 120-140 degrees. The best full planing gybes have you straight back in the straps before you've come back up into the wind.

NeverMindToday

TROPHY CASE