Windsurfuk.com

Some problems with electronic items lately have driven me potty!

Just over a year back I made the mistake of buying another Philips device a DVP5900 HDMI DVD Player. Last Philips device I had was a nice widescreen telly, which promptly broke down just outside the 1yr warranty and cost lots to fix.

The player was excellent when it worked (read most DivX’s and Xvid’s), it was reasonable quality too. The only operational gripe I had was the remote control was rubbish and the player did not allow bookmarks…..

Thing is, its broken. It just stopped allowing fast forwards and reverses and then finally stopped altogether! Argh!

Next day of course the final straw was drawn. My lovely Sony Ericsson K610i that I raved about.. died also after just 6 short months of life. I’ve looked after it so well, it was such a great phone and one day during a call it just switched off and stopped working. Gutted and worse still, I had got the phone through ETown Digital in Newmarket and it ‘had no warranty as its a parallel import’. What a load of tosh! ETown Digital have been utterly useless, touting expensive repair bills and when I asked for the country of origin of the phone they said ‘we import for so many countries we don’t know’….

Comments(0)

A lot has been happening lately, lots and lots of visitors - sorry for the lack of blog updates!

Anyways, I’m living in the same house as before with Francis, Stewart (Francis’s mate from Ncalt) and Kat. We’ve gotten some new furniture and are having a right good time.

Kat has moved jobs and works for a private practise on the North Shore and is really enjoying it - although she works odd shifts.. 6am to 2pm and 11am to 7pm. *yawn*

I’ve been doing some kiting, had a few good days on my 13m Tribal, one recently at Shakespeare, which is down the Whagaparoa penninsula, north of Auckland. I’ve got some pictures.. one of which is below…

Comments(0)

I arrived back in Ireland on the afternoon of Sunday November 5th, after a monster journey via LA to Heathrow, then with BMI to Belfast City.

The security was tight and we had to remove our shoes as well as give fingerprints and photos in LA. As usual, there was a huge queue outside the transit area and it took 1hr and 30 minutes to process all the passengers. Given that the plane takes about 2 hours to refuel I’m finding it hard to see the point. What use is all this security - if someone wants to do something dodgy, surely they would just come up with a creative way of circumventing security, such as bribing a baggage handler?

As usual Air New Zealand are up to the task, 34 inches of legroom in economy and friendly staff. The food was ok, nothing bad and not exceptional but all in all a good experience.
I fly back on November 17th to Auckland. This time via Hong Kong as it was cheaper and is much nicer than going via LA. At least in Hong Kong you get looked after and treated like a person, unlike LA where you feel like a Guantanamo bay tourist. Yes, all the Yanks are missing is a free orange jumpsuit when you land.

Ireland is still as beautiful as it was almost 12 months ago when I was last here. The weather is fairly rotten, its about 12 degrees during the day and drops to about 5 degrees at night. Manageable alright, but having living in Auckland now its odd to have such a cold winter! Of course I’m enjoying seeing my mates and also tasting British Confectionery again (my girlfriend Kat wants minstrels/Galaxy and now I understand why!). This morning I received a text from my mate Dion requesting none other than bubble gum to be shipped back!

I wonder what the most popular confectionery item is among ex-pats? Personally its Galaxy chocolate and Kinder Maxi.. oh yummy!

Comments(0)

Well, its been over a month now since I’ve had my slim, black 8gb nano and so far so good. ITunes 7 is very good, the nano has been abused and still hasn’t a single scratch on the case, nor the screen! I haven’t had a chance to fully discharge the battery, but can well believe the 24 hour battery life.

Sound quality is excellent also. Overall, for someone who ditched the iPod 3 years ago and has come back I’m impressed with the progress.

Comments(0)

Recently I replaced my broken car stereo with an impulse purchase one sunday afternoon - an Alpine CDA-9857. I got it from RapidRadio in Auckland after hearing an advert on the radio whilst driving around town one sunday afternoon.

Whats cool:

- Full speed IPod integration which means just that, its like your head unit is the ipod
- Sound quality is amazing
- Can connect usb hard disks with optional adapter

Whats not cool:

- First stereo failed with a loud buzzing noise within a week
- Second stereo had a broken IPod interface
Still, RapidRadio have excellent customer service and replaced both head units on the spot, so can’t fault them. Not quite so sure about Alpine’s QA process tho. But from what I’ve read their IPod interface is the only decent one around so beggers can’t be choosers I guess.
The next impulse purchase was a 2nd Gen 8gig IPod nano. Got that from Ubertec in Parnell (the Apple center). Very impressive, 24 hour battery life, doesn’t scratch easily either. All in all rather chuffed. I had being trying convergence style devices for quite some time merging a phone with a mp3 player, but I just found far too many compromises. You either get stuck with Nokia and proprietary pop port connectors (meaning shitty headphones forever) or a rather short battery life. I’ve seen the new Sony Walkman phones and they do look the biz, but I haven’t heard that many good reviews of them yet. Time will tell I guess

Last weekend I went snowboarding in Turoa and Whakapapa. It was top notch spring riding, although at 15 degrees the snow is dying fast. Turoa was the better of the 2 with better depth and nicer runs. Whakapapa was rather choppy and busier also.

Comments(0)

Well, I had some fun last week. Found a nice house in Takapuna and thought I’d put an offer in for it…. asked the listing agent if there were any issues etc and I was told ‘no’. All good

Put an offer in and then got a survey done. The surveyor noticed that one of the other houses in the bunch looked dodgy and said I should check it out. I rang the body corporate and discovered that the houses were troublesome and one or two of them have been leaky… and since its body corp, who would have to pay for them to get fixed?! Everyone including me!

So thats the end of that saga, offer withdrawn.

Got my hands on a nice new Alpine 9857 iPod compatible in-car audio system as my car cd player is broken. Pretty neat system and they are bringing out usb integration. Its due out soon and is a KCA-620M module.. I’ll be able to plug my usb hard disk into it!!

Below are some photos from my desk in Takapuna.

Finally.. had a quick kite last night in Shoal Bay… 13m weather at the start and got about half an hour before the wind died. Not bad considering I was just driving past the beach and spotted some people out, only to u-turn and grab my kit!

Comments(0)

The lack of updates have been caused by me having too good a time - sorry!

August 5th I flew to Wanaka and did 9 days snowboarding on my new Ride Prophet 159. The first day was a Saturday which we did at the remarkables, having landed in Queenstown. Its a reasonable resort, a little limited on terrain, but with a good beginners park. Chris Prior managed to pursuade me to start riding on box rails again - I’ve got a real phobia of them having hit myself real bad last season trying to boardslide.

The rest of the week was spent at Treble Cone and Cardrona. There were some freshies to be had and the Cardy park is really well setup. Treble Cone hasn’t changed much from last season - its got a proper park now which rocks. It also has a wider green run renamed ‘easy rider’ in an attempt to make it sound less daunting!!

On the final Saturday I got a ski lesson from Jez - it was hilarious and I was like a little lost lamb! I didn’t realise skiing was so hard until now. Going down the green run was really stressful and I spent most of the run laughing as I looked like such a twit. Jez was very patient tho and it helped lots to have someone qualified there to help.

Started my new job at Bravura on the 15th and really enjoying it. The team are a great bunch of guys, all really experienced with good reasoning and the company has really good practises for software engineering. Thumbs up from me - I’ve even done a few days overtime already as I want to get things done and help us build something great.

I’ve also started house hunting and have put an offer in for a place in central Takapuna, North Shore. Its very spacious (220 m2) and in a great location. Daunting buying a house as I’ve never had a debt before - first time for everything!!! Jez has been looking also and is hitting an auction on wednesday for a place nearby. Francis has also just got a new job as a project manager - so its all go.

Today I kitesurfed at Muriwai, it was 9m weather and the Tribal was excellent as usual. The current a Muriwai is worthy of a mention as I ditched the kite once and started getting dragged out - even though I could touch the bottom! You’ve gotta be really careful here. It was WNW - so perfect cross-on starboard tack out. The sets were reasonably spaced, but getting out the back was a mission as one mistake and you could be in a lot of trouble.

Lake Taupo - we got lost on the way back from the mountains….

Comments(0)

Yay! I finally got myself a new job with a cool company called Bravura Solutions based right on the beach at Takapuna. I’ll be working on their insurance products as a lead tech with architecture. They’ve just gone public on the Australian stock market and are going places.. I’m very excited.

Last weekend I kited both days at Shoal Bay in Bayswater. Got to fly both the 9m Tribal and the 13m. The 9m is really fast and you have to be fully concentrating or it will punish you. The 13 is just getting better and better, very responsive with a fantastic top end. Pictures below…

This weekend I was at Orewa on Saturday wavesailing - 13m Tribal again. It was gusty as hell and really hard work, even with the Tribal’s massive depower range I found myself constantly relying on the centre power strap to get control out the back. I did my first large jump (about 14ft off a wave) and almost landed it, however the fear of death stopped that dead in its tracks!!

Water relaunching the Tribal is a cinch with the recovery line. Really easy. I’ve had it backwind a few times on me though, you need to be really careful with oversheeting in the turns. I think I will use the middle pigtail on the power line next time and see if that makes the difference.

Comments(0)

Well, finally the ski season has kicked off good and proper. 140cm snow on Turoa and 90cm on Whakapapa! We rode at Turoa on Sunday 25th June and are heading down again this weekend. Francis and Jez now are both living in a really nice apartment down by the waterfront in Auckland…. at long last Francis decided to stay!

Got some new kites recently also, a new F-One Tribal 13m and F-One Tribal 9m. Had a really good day on Muriwai about 3 weeks ago, but since then its either been windless or snowy (cold!). The Tribal has a huge depower range, I was riding with the 13m when other people were out with 9’s.

Currently looking for another job. The daily grind is wearing me down, come in, sit down, code, go home. A bit of a tangental shift from visiting clients, solving problems at a business level and driving the requirements and implementations through to test.

Does Co-Development accross 2 Hemispheres work and more importantly can people develop effectively without direct client interaction or at least business analysts? Thats the topic of my next post, its going to be a biggie! Initial thoughts are that off-shoring work is certainly no silver bullet and can end up costing more than anyone ever anticipated - it often sneaks under the radar…..

Comments(0)

Eventually gotten my paws on the elusive birthday party pictures. Well not really, as you’ve got to look on John’s blog (my kitesurfing housemate) to get them!

Friday night was Dion’s (my workmate) housewarming party in his Mairangi Bay retreat. 5 of us went to join the other 4 guests. It was a total blowout and we left at 1015 and headed out in Auckland instead. Now I have a longstanding ban on Viaduct Harbour activities, but Brendan managed to drag me to Pacha kicking and screaming. It was actually a really good night!

Sunday was spent kitesurfing in Orewa, rigged the Naish V4 25m and went for a blast. The wind increased by 2 knots, ouch! Was totally overpowered and had to offload the kite onto John. Then tried out the new Best Waroo Flat kite. It was a complete revolution, I have never flown anything like it.

Firstly it can be more or less completely depowered. Secondly it has little bar pressure. The only bad point I found was it was easy-ish to oversheet and stall. Thats probably more down to setup or design of the kite. Lee from Anabatic said it was due to lack of wind, but I’m just not convinced as I was planing. I have heard good things about this new Flexifoil ION and the FOne Tribal which I would love to Demo, but thats going to be a hard one as the FOne dealer here in Auckland doesn’t allow a demo. Ouch.

Here is a pic of John and I describing a day in the office

Comments(0)