Nothing Dramatic

With the referendum forthcoming, I've noticed that most New Zealanders have no idea what the current legislation about corporal punishment of children actually says. So here it is:

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Our local branch of New Zealand's largest retailer, The Warehouse, has reorganised the layout of their clothing departments. I'm not sure whether the shelf movers failed to realise that the signage at the top could be unclipped and moved, or whether the Warehouse has a new policy of catering to cross-dressers The signs have been like this for several weeks now.

The balmy "indian summer" days (where we've been averaging 20 - 21° by day and 15° by night) have gone with a bang. Monday night was windy with a capital W. Our 10ft trampoline with safety nets got airborne enough to hop over the two large terracotta pito pots and get the top of the net frame hung up on the corner of the house roof. I'm surprised the local weather stations only measured a peak gust of 64km/h - it felt stronger (but our topography creates many microclimates). But we did have average speeds in excess of 50km/h for more than 6 hours. Last night was calm and cold instead.

Driving home from Hawera in steady rain this morning, I obverved that 80% of the drivers behind me were not observing the "four second rule" recommended for wet weather. In fact many weren't even following the two second rule for dry weather. I don't see what anyone gains from the extra risk. Passing lanes are signposted well in advance, so it is easy to follow at a safe distance and close the gap just before the start of the lane.

A challenge to all snack-food manufacturers: Re-engineer the corn chip to make it nacho-proof.

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On facebook, become the friend of the kids of all those out-of-town friends. The kids were all about 8 or 9 when you last saw them at any length, and now they are all at university or starting bands.

Latest stats from one of the websites on my server seemed worthy of mention:

Browsers	Hits	Percent
Mozilla	517660	49.4 %
MS Internet Explorer	493888	47.1 %

IE has declined at about 6% per month since it was at 70% in August. December is the first month IE is coming 2nd.
Note that this is a general e-commerce site with a userbase which is likely to be quite conservative and would definitely not attract many web designers or others of the "converted". Traffic is 6-8 GB/month. Biggest origin country is the US, but there is strong traffic from Europe, Russia and the Ukraine as well as Hong Kong.

And Opera? currently below 1% having declined somewhat over the year. Opera peaked at 7% in 2007 (the month the site got blogged in russia and saw 12GB traffic from Russia alone). I haven't yet reconfigured AWstats to look for Google Chrome's signature.

My dear wife's computer is in the living room. And Mr 19 months is unstoppable when he decides to clmb onto a chair and pound away at the keyboard - hence we lock the computer whenever we leave it. However, he still manages to hit the sleep key from time to time, making getting going again much more slow and painful. So I set about trying to disable the sleep key. It turns out that in Control Panel/Power Options, Windows XP offers "do nothing as one of four options when the sleep key is pressed. Win2K only offers two: shut down and standby.

However, the following registry hack will disable the sleep key for all users in Win2000.

---BEGIN - Don't copy this line----
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\PowerCfg\GlobalPowerPolicy]
"Policies"=hex:01,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,08,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,\
00,00,00,08,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,00,00,00,80,00,00,00,00,03,00,\
00,00,00,00,00,80,02,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,01,00,00,\
00,00,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,04,00,00,c0,01,00,00,00,\
04,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,0a,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,01,00,01,00,01,\
00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,\
00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,00,\
00,16,00,00,00

[HKEY_USERS\.Default\Control Panel\PowerCfg\GlobalPowerPolicy]
"Policies"=hex:01,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,08,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,\
00,00,00,08,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,00,00,00,80,00,00,00,00,03,00,\
00,00,00,00,00,80,02,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,01,00,00,\
00,00,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,04,00,00,c0,01,00,00,00,\
04,00,00,00,01,00,00,00,0a,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,01,00,01,00,01,\
00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,\
00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,03,00,00,00,00,\
00,16,00,00,00
----END - Don't copy this line----

Save the bit between the lines as sleepless.reg, then run it and reboot.

Solution courtesy of eperts-exchange.com, who seem to operate a stupidity tax: It tells you to "sign up for a free 7 day trial" to get the answer to the question, but the answer is actually there free and no-obligation if you wait a few seconds and scroll down the (long) page.

We are in the process of putting together our emergency survival kit - something every household should have. It is designed to keep us going for 3-4 days if we lose everything else. But in a civil emergency where we lose power but are best to stay put in the house, we would use the contents of the freezer first.

So far we have:
Containers - 2 x 25 litre lidded storage bins
4 cans of Irish stew
3 cans of corned beef
4 cans of spaghetti/baked beans
1 can of peas
1 can of corn
2 packets of dried mashed potato
1 packet of dried vegetables
5 packets of 2-minute noodles
1 packet of corn thins
1 kg of milk powder
1 can opener
4 rolls of toilet paper
9 litres (6 bottles) of water.
Candles
plastic utensils
Our mini butane stove plus spare canister.
Apparently we should have 36 litres of water for a family of four, but that's a lot of bulk to store. We will probably get another 6-pack of bottles plus some water purifying tablets (bleach will do at a pinch).
There's a balance between canned and dried food. The latter requires more water, but is much easier to carry should we have to evacuate on foot.

We still have to add:
* Candle-holder and matches (in waterproof container), cigarette lighter
* Torch (ideally a hand-cranked one), AM/FM radio and batteries
* plastic bags (ziplock)
* small first aid kit, paracetamol. (and we'd remember to grab the big first aid kit from the car if we can)
* sachets of some vitamin-rich juice or energy drink.
* foil survival blankets
* face and dust masks (important here as our biggest threat is probably the volcano)
* antiseptic wipes (I figure it might be difficult to wash cooking gear well).

The shortest-lived food has a 9 month life, but most is 18 months - 3 years (and longer for the cans). We will use and replace expiring stock every January and June.
If you think of anything else we should have, leave a comment.

Now, how's your kit??

A few months back, we had a death in the family. Our trusty can-opener of many years died. It was the old pressed-metal type - not very comfortable to hold, but it did what it was supposed to do. Since the nylon bush which held everything in place split in half, fixing it seemed impossible, so we gave it a decent burial.

Enter the Mark II can opener. By no means the cheapest in the store. It had comfortable rounded grips and an easier-on-the fingers turny-bit (that's jargon). However, it soon turned out that our new utensil had flunked the kitchenware equivalent of university and bought a degree from a spammer. You punctured the lid and turned the turny-bit and nothing happened. The odd alarum and excursion (around the can without cutting), but it couldn't open cans. We eventually found that it could open cans in a sense - if you repeated the puncture action every 5mm around the circumference, but that is hardly efficient and left rather a jaggy edge.

Then we went away for a night, leaving my inlaws in charge our our two and their three. They must have encountered a can-opening crisis because on our return there was basic pressed-metal-can-opener mark II. Unfortunately these beasties are either good or pretty useless - maybe it's determined by the position of Jupiter's great red spot at the exact moment they are made? This particular one fell into the latter category. It will stay on track if you apply 3.5 tons of pressure to the handles, but this makes the turny-thing very hard to turn.

So, chanting "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" I went to the professional catering equipment supplier in town and said "I want a can opener which actually opens cans". This eloquent plea struck a chord with the owner, and with a sympathetic eye he guided me to the Good Cook brand, which he claimed had surpassed the Victorinox ones in his estimation. It uses a horizontal cutting wheel. I had previously owned an opener with a horizontal wheel and it cut beneath the lip, leaving a nice blunt-edged lip but a deadly sharp can wall. The owner assured me this was not the case with the Good Cook opener, so I parted with my money.

Let the fact that I am blogging about it be testament to how happy I am with this opener. It needs minimal effort to operate, and cuts halfway up the lip leaving blunt edges on both lid and can (and a good enough fit between them that you could put the lid back on the can and keep the ants out). It even has a doodad for opening tear-top cans, thereby saving broken fingernails and bent teaspoons. Domestic utopia. And the good news, dear reader, is that it is designed in the US so probably widely available.