Joshua Leung

Here's my favourite snap of the two fantails from today

(The black morph seems to have a tasty snack in is beak, while the other one has a fluffy bum!)

Full album of the best ones below

https://www.flickr.com/photos/aligorith/albums/72177720335962041

#Birding #NZBirds #Fantails

Just got home from a good 2hr long walk around the Botanic Garden slinging bird lens.

In case you're wondering:
No, I still haven't seen the celebrity big bird (falcon)

The closest I came was when I ran into a mother daughter (?) pair who were also wandering around (and said that the specific area we were in, someone had apparently spotted it about an hour ago, and that it supposedly was usually only around 3m off the ground)

What I did manage to see + photograph:
Most of the other birds living in the gardens!

Particular highlights:
* Finally managed to snap the pair of Quail

* Saw the pair of welcome swallows (there was only one last time) together, AND also where their nest is!

* Found a big group of little cuties with yellow heads and brown bodies
(EDIT: A quick search brings up the "NZ Garden Bird Survey's" page, showing them as "Yellowhammers")

* Saw a pair of fantails on a branch together - one a regular brown-white one, and the other a seemingly black-morph

* Got some nice footage of a large cluster of ducklings

* Got some snaps of silvereyes enjoying the Umbrella Blossom that the gardens had been advertising on their socials a few days ago

* May have managed a snap of one of the loudly singing bellbirds, (and a distant tiny-dot snap of what I presume may have been a riroriro)

Eek! It's more than a little concerning that there's been a "lab related death" from a "pneumonia type" illness... from Russia this time! 😬

While I don't trust China (especially having seen multiple Chinese science labs with my own eyes), my own dealings with Russian folks (I.e. in short - eventually screwed over badly each time) leave me even less trusting of a disease lab from Russia!

(Heck, as much as we need some disease experts, I think it is best for personal safety to keep maintaining a distance from folks who work with such stuff on a routine basis... as I've been doing 😅)

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/russian-researcher-dies-of-plague-released-by-lab-accident/CAPNKP7KOFCU5MJ7J2NNKHJNVU/

Just saw a post saying there might be Aurora activity tonight (when it gets darker enough tonight), and that there might have been some last night too!

Me: I'd been looking at all those "grey clouds" last night wondering if by some chance we might have had Aurora activity, but didn't bother grabbing my camera to check (even if that would've taken just 2 seconds for do)... Doh! 🤦‍♂️😅

@tj I'd argue this applies not only to web developers (who keep trying to hide them outright), but also all OS designers who keep working harder and harder and harder to make them all but invisible + unusable! 🤬

Among other annoyances in this category are:

1. Scrollbars that are often now too thin to even aim at, which is made worse by

2. Scrollbars that are not visible by default, and will disappear mere seconds after the most recent scrolling interaction ends

3. And even when they are visible + not too thin, they are configured to be very low contrast + translucent...

Having lived through the 90's / early 2000's ugly grey MS Windows type scrollbars, I can understand why a lot of people are scarred from that experience.

But IMO, most designers took the wrong lessons from those. Key things we should've done different:

• Changed from "click to go up/down a page" (i.e. mostly pointless) to opening up "click anywhere to scroll there" (which is what a few enlightened designs do)

• Instead of making them smaller and smaller and less visible, we should've tackled instead the problem that they were no offering enough value, and instead leaned in hard on covering them in clickable markers (with optional additional details) to jump to useful landmarks

#JukeboxFridayNight theme this week is #Royalty eh?

Well then: #1) Lorde's "Royal" comes to mind first

#2) Then, there are all those "most British" sounding things, e.g.

• William Walton - Crown Imperial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCP9M50rOYw

• Doreen Carwithen - Suffolk Suite https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXKJuZ2kaS8

Woah.... the office apparently has only 21% humidity today / currently. It had been sitting around 30% all of last week, going as high as 32 and as low as 29. (It used to be up around 40-50% a few months ago)

For reference, my room at home had 47% after keeping the heatpump on all night long too, after usually being in the 55-64% range. (Heck, the one in my other house usually shows 63%, but I discovered that the cold has done in that one's battery, so I didn't know how cold exactly it was in there yesterday after the -4 nights!)

😳

Had a very productive trip to the Mitre10's garden centre today LOL:

* Got a replacement "Little John Bottlebrush" for the one that *DIED* this autumn as a result of the interminable roadworks outside our house making it hard to return home to tend to the garden for a good 2 months (after spending the first month enduring the shit)...

Therefore, I'm officially putting this on the tab of debt owed by the blasted roadworks company (on top of all the extra petrol costs incurred during the oil crisis spike from having to move out). 😜️

* Finally found some replacements for the "Ring a Ding Ding" Correa that I got from them a few years ago... that thing lasted barely a month! Will see if I manage to keep these alive for longer this time...

* Got some new "potting bags" as i've run out of those....

Hah... turns out the Spirit of Douglas DC3 was flying around this afternoon again. I thought I had heard something like it when leaving Briscoes this afternoon, but then brushed it off as the SUV rolling past at that moment 😅

Here comes a strong wind blast, and what looks like a murky gray cloud layer!

On that note, have you taken a good look at the country of origin of stuff you're regularly buying?

We've been recently very surprised to find that:
* Sunrice (Australia) now import from Thailand + India only IIRC

* Practically all cooking oil now comes from Malaysia... But god knows if some of that actually secretly comes from China now! (For record, China had scandals involving "recycled" cooking oil scraped from filthy back alleys... and/or other ones involving cooking oil transported in petroloum tankers!!!)

* Equally disturbing is how we're increasingly having no local garlic across increasingly many months (I.e. used to be only summer, but now winter too), with only the Chinese produced ones (looking way too artifically uniform)/beyond stocked!

* Oh, and Nashi pears have long ended up being mostly China only too, despite us previously having some local supply (oh, and the supermarkets often mislabel these!)

Based on my experiences today, I'd like to offer the following feature requests to Linux install tool partition editor UI devs:

1) If you have to use MiB, just give us an alternative units drop down for MB (defaulting to MB), and do the necessary calculations / conversions under the hood

2) It's high time to add the option to do a "Standard multi-partition install" equivalent of the "Erase Disk (and create single partition install)". This would essentially ensure you have separate root and home directories (*), with swap + anything else needed all getting auto included too. All of these would be set to default sizes relative to the available disk space, that can then be tweaked as desired (ie mainly OS vs Home dir split).

(*) In this day and age, that would seem a sensible default choice, given how many OS's need reinstalling every few years anyway, whereas your personal files are often a lot more persistent (i.e. you really don't want to have to keep restoring those from backups all the time)

3) Lower priority, but could we also get the option to reorder partitions we're newly creating / don't exist yet. Makes it easier to figure out how much space we can play with?

#Linux #UX

You know, I still can't believe that FIFA's current chief is literally called: "Infantino"

Which, as any non-Italian speaker would surmise is how you'd "Italianise" the word: "Infant-like", or more directly, "Infantile"

Then again... we did name a government department "Oranga Tamariki" for many years here... which TBH I can't help but think of as a crude hodge-podge slur against old Drumpy (i.e. as in "Orange Children" descended from "Oompa Loompas") everytime I hear that name 😜

So, we literally have an Infantile CEO going around handing gold trophies to "The Orange Toddler" 🙄

What other brands does the multinational conglomerate owner of Heinz Watties own?

Perhaps it's time to slap that corporate behamoth with punitive tariffs and fines on its other non-NZ produced brands it is selling here, in response to its "rationalising" of its production facilities to only include those from outside NZ, while continuing to ship externally produced stuff here 😜

@nzJayZee@mastodon.nz @ygathgoch@cloudisland.nz

Reminds me - Things I've tried that didnt go well:

1. Cross stiching a little scene of penguins IIRC. Never did get around to finish it! I only got a few steps in, as it took ages. Can't remember why I stopped, other than it taking way too long, and maybe getting injured from pulling the needle and thread in and out so many times!

2. Making a fluffy cat plushie from a kitset I got at that old teddy bear store on the ground floor of the blue building on the corner facing Oxford on the Avon + Victoria Square. IIRC, the problem was that that used a grey "fur cloth" that may have shed a few too many fibres everywhere - So, after barely getting the first steps done (ie. Cutting out the front and back sides from the fur using the templates) I had to give it up as I kept having nose bleeds everytime I opened up the bag! Otherwise, it would in theory have made a very cute grey persian!

Things I haven't tried but am curious about:

• Knitting and crochet - Not really things many dudes do TBH, but given that grandma used to always do this when I was a kid, AND she was apparently really good at it too, I am admittedly curious if I have inherited some of that talent 😜

Something tells me it should feel very similar to the feeling you get writing assembly/machine oppose sequences - i.e. There's a "manual yet rhythmic feel" to it once you get into a groove

(I am admittedly early good still at threading up needles and sewing machines - even after not doing it for decades!)

Oh, and a word about some of the motorists tonight:

• There was one jeep-like vehicle, who was violently zig-zagging across the center line in a hurry, trying to find the parking lot they were looking for. They did this right outside the Central Police Station FFS! 🙄

• Half a block earlier, we watched a SUV circumvent the line of cones preventing driving into Lichfield St heading east (i.e. the stretch where The Crossing Carpark is), clipping and driving over that first one!

• There were a few other vehicles out there that were driving a bit erratically

Sheesh! 😬

@cousinsd@mastodon.nz Hang on... just scrolled back to see your flu + covid booster post

Yeah, that's probably your immune system doing weird shit. In other words, if you got a flu or covid for real, you'd probably feel the same thing too (e.g. for me, it's my right knee going off, from that time I landed heavily on it on that Milford Sound tour day)

Other examples:

• In the past 2 years, 2 different colleagues have been wiped out by the flu vaccines

• Mum and I were also completely wiped out by our 3-4th or was it 4th-5th covid boosters (you know, raging fever, chills, full body pains, debilitating fatigue, etc.) - for a good 48hrs, starting about 10pm following a 2:30 jab. Really horrid stuff...

Also, dunno if it was just that tonight is Anzac day, but:

• "Lots" of Chinese Restaurants were closed tonight (e.g. in particular Joyful, Little Spicy, Shanghai Bistro).

• Joyful in particular was weird: All the lights were on, the kitchen exhaust fans were running full bore, the manager was there doing stuff, and there were 2 tables of people inside! BUT... the sign on the door said they were closed!

There was no notice that they were closed today / tonight though... Am almost wondering if someone played a cruel trick on them, and flipped their sign. (OR, some of the employees were disgruntled at having to work... OR, just that someone forgot to check on the sign!)

In any case, it was suspiciously quiet there tonight!

• The other 2 I mentioned were all darkened

• Various other places were open though. Kind of busy too...

You know, the type (*) where you sign in for the day/week, and straight off the bat have a "not so great" looking defect to investigate from the weekend...

Only to then roll straight into investigating defect number 2 (that crops up just when finish analysing number 1)

But oh wait... number 3 rolls in mid morning too! (Before you've now finished writing up a ticket for fixing the first one!)

Then somehow, several hours have passed by (from the back and forth of everyone trying to narrow down number 3, in between looking at number 2), and then all of a sudden it's 5:30, and you can finally write up number 1...

Yeah... it's definitely "not ideal" when your original plan for the week was: "Try to finish off that tricky thing from last week, that you got bogged down on last week..." (especially, when it turns out that some of the complications now actually tie into Defect 1 😜)

(*) We have these once every other month... or maybe once every few months... It's not always this bad (i.e. we *do* have quiet weeks, when not much gets in your way), but days like these do sometimes crop up 😅

Had to pop into the office to do some testing today (I usually don't come in on Wednesdays)

* 1) The room is boiling hot - the folks in the office today don't usually sit by the windows, so didn't bother putting down the shades, AND have only turned on a single aircon unit.

* 2) Ops had another crash (in the time I spent getting in), with a rather exotic presentation (I.e. a "window not responding" popup that is usually only seen on Windows, and *never* before on our Linux systems) 🤯

Gah... this week keeps giving! 🙄

Ugh... not feeling too flash this morning. Kinda woozy / sleepy still 😵‍💫️

Had two weird dreams this morning:
1) Somehow I was in a meeting where someone was trying to get me to sign off on a new wing-mirror sized + shaped display that had an info display built in QML

2) Ended up sitting in a vehicle that was being slowly moved through a weird dimly lit roller-coaster like shaft (it was nearly always either going upwards or turning corners or something), with some heavy duty black rollers (top + bottom, mounted on some chunky red/orange frames) everywhere that were constantly rolling + clanking loudly.

Then at some point, we were finally let off for doing some kind of "cross border checks" where they wanted to x-ray everything - cars, bags, people...

And then, people becoming quite happy that the crossing would be happening a few hours 8-13) later vs being delayed a few days, and then quickly dispersing off to all the instant noodle vending machines + neon-lit massage pods... WTF?!

3) There was another one before these two that I can't remember anymore...

Maybe something involving needing to check for things in massive lists pinned to notice boards...

EDIT: Ahh... I remember now! One day, I turn up, and am again being told that we all need to temporarily move office again (this has happened to me a few times over they years). Only, that most people are going to one of two offices / rooms, while I end up in another one by myself, lodged with another team that is never there either (except for that day after a few weeks, when this tennis-mad lady who looks like the mad scientist from Pixar's Hoppers showed up with a few underlings). I remembering thinking that there's no point showing up there as it's just like being WFH except I have a commute + it seems lonelier as everyone else seemed to drop off the map.