The Winter of our Discontent

Another infamous Wellington southerly hitting the coast close to the airport... it don’t stop them flying but it makes takeoff and landing time much more interesting!

It’s official. This has got to be the crappiest winter on record.

Heard on the news earlier this week, during an almost unprecedented break in the weather, that if our bodies are telling us that winter is nearly over, normally that would be right – it’s been about three months. Unfortunately as winter came in a month earlier than normal this year the reality is that, based on the seasonal norms, we are actually only half way through winter. So the word from the boys at the Met office is, hunker down and expect more of the same!

And what a winter it’s been! Even HRH Queen Elizabeth is aware that her loyal subjects in Godzone are not having the best of weather. My personal experience has been that I’ve only had to mow the lawns once in three months (and that was really just a quick tidy up, they could have done another two months at least as most of them are still under water) and the dogs have taken to swimming out to do their business before coming in with hypothermia. We’ve had a succession of gale-force southerlies blowing straight off the South Pole and it’s been icy cold for months.

Even the Government’s got in on the act. Apparently the problem is that when we all first colonised the place we made the mistake of thinking that this was a ‘temperate’ climate (European settlers weren’t the first – the Maoris, and the Morioris before them obviously thought the same thing or they wouldn’t have stopped here. I wonder how they coped without polypropylene?). Anyway, the story is that’s why we built all these quaint little wooden houses with absolutely no insulation qualities. Seriously, in Petone (which is where some of the first European settlers landed) the wind blows in straight off the South Pole and the average house is colder inside than outside. So what we need to do, and John Key and his mates in the Beehive are going to help us out here, is insulate all our houses to 1st World standards.

The story is, if your house is over 10 years old the Government will give you money towards under-floor insulation, ceiling insulation, wall insulation, heat pumps, you name it! And they’ll help you out with finance for the rest. Which is not only good news for the average house owner, it’s also great for those people who want to get into the insulation retrofitting and heat pump installation industry! It’s even got residential property investors smiling, they can increase the value of their housing portfolio and get a Government handout. All in all, in these recessionary times, it’s a great thing.

Our house doesn’t qualify however, because it was built after Y2K (remember Y2K?). Which normally wouldn't have worried me. You see, our house meets modern insulation standards. Since we moved in here we’ve always said that it’s a warm house. Sure, it’s made of wood, not brick or concrete or stone. It doesn’t have double glazing. But it’s well insulated. And it’s well designed for this location. It takes full advantage of passive solar heating. It has a large, north facing roof what heats up like you wouldn’t believe when then sun’s out. Any little ray of sunshine warms the cavernous roofspace and is then pumped down and circulated through the house. We’ve had quite a few winters here and never found it that cold.

Except for the last three months we’ve had bugger-all sun.

So bring on your global warming. I can’t wait!

“Take it easy - take the TRAIN”?

Not that I’m a greenie or anything... but I had a mid-day meeting in town today and a bit of time up my sleeve. So seeing as we have a train station practically at the end of our street I thought I'd do the decent thing and try to save the planet, which apparently is warming at an alarming rate (here in Wellington we have yet to see any evidence of this – particularly this winter, more to come on this in a subsequent post – but the media assures me that this is the case). It was also ‘$2.00 Thursday’ – this happens on the second week of the school holidays and is a blatant attempt by TranzMetro (or KiwiRail, or whatever they like to be called these days) to bribe people that don’t normally take the train so that they can show them just what they’ve been missing.

Due to it’s geographic constraints Wellington actually ‘enjoys’ a relatively high amount of public rail transport compared with the rest of New Zealand where rail service is practically non-existent. The rail lines run more or less where you would expect them to and are within easy distance of many residential suburbs (apart from the southern or eastern suburbs – this was due to a bureaucratic oversight early last century when some clown decided to put a city in the way). But this winter they’ve had bad reviews. Not only are people actually freezing in the carriages (the heating systems have broken and TranzMetro refuses to carry spares to repair them) but the timetables are erratic and the infrastructure is run down, dilapidated and on the point of collapse. Which is why, last year, the outgoing government decided to pay top dollar and buy rail back, lock, stock and barrel, from the latest in a succession of private-sector companies that brought it and subsequently asset-stripped it (much to the delight of their shareholders).

The service this winter has actually been so bad that TranzMetro even reduced fares for monthly commuters July passes and announced that they would give all commuters FREE return trips on two selected Fridays. Unfortunately on the first of these nominated Fridays some fool of a TranzMetro contractor decided to start his part of the project a day early and brought the whole rail network to a standstill for six hours, starting with the morning rush period. TranzMetro’s failure to convey this information to many commuters was another source of frustration with many succumbing to frostbite while waiting on grotty, run-down and graffiti-laden platforms for trains that were never going to arrive.

Anyhow, this morning I came hurtling down the street and flung myself onto the platform just in time for the 11:23 train. Which failed to show up before 11:45, delivering me into Wellington 25 minutes late. Meaning that I was forced to ‘take it easy’ loitering on a grotty platform next to three brand new, but already severely defaced shelters before climbing into a run-down unit and travelling along the refuse-laden rail corridor into town. Meeting over I raced back to the Wellington station, missing my train, which had departed right on time, by less than a minute. I then had to ‘take it easy’ for another half hour before getting back to work.

“Take it easy, take the train”? Yeah, right!

CMS or static pages? You decide!

What do you want from your website?

No, really. Do you want an online brochure that presents your company and its services? Are you more interested in featuring current news and events? Are you planning to frequently update your content? Perhaps most importantly, do you have the necessary skills?

Many people would say that a website should include a Content Management System (CMS). These websites can have all the latest features, blogs, RSS feeds, etc plus an administration console where a site administrator can edit or add content to the site. Sounds great, doesn’t it? No HTML or coding knowledge required! With one of these sites you can do your own updates and there’s no need to go back to your designer or web developer everytime you want to change something.

However it pays to be careful. Having a database-driven website can open the door to all manner of security issues, not the least of which is having someone ‘inject’ malicious code into your database, corrupting it and allowing them administration access to your files. How would you cope if this happened? Who is responsible for backup and restoration of your data and how often is this done? What do you know about site security? If your site uses a complex CMS with lots of features, do you have the knowledge to operate it properly?

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not opposed to Content Managed websites at all. I build and administer both static-content and CMS sites and can see that CMS interfaces are a great way for site owners to maintain their own websites. But each CMS is different and they’re often a ‘one size fits all’ solution. If you stick to creating and editing text content, fine. But if you have a need that’s even slightly outside the scope of what the site is capable of, you’re stuck. Unless you can find a workaround (which usually involves a bit of old-fashioned HTML know-how).

If you’re not into constantly updating your web content and you want a stable site that can’t be compromised with the flexibility to modify pages to look the way you want them to, good ol’ HTML, with a smattering of CSS, can still be the best way to go!