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The Rant Issue

Posted: 28-05-07

So after I could deal with their precarious and very obvious presence no longer - all piled in my inbox like the vertical book stacking in Ghostbusters, I finally succumbed to the phenomenon that is Facebook.com.

OK, first the good news - it's really cool! I mean, you can import all the entries in your Yahoo or Hotmail accounts and it'll cross reference them with the email addresses it already holds.

The bad news is that it will also inadvertently indicate the reason so many people you hadn't heard from in three years hadn't written lately; because they're completely engrossed in daubing on walls, and joining groups named 'SLAUGHTERHOUSE - Patrick's new film' and 'Unlike 99.99% of the Facebook population, I was born in the 70s' (Thanks to an old Flatmate for those).

I had prided myself on successfully avoiding my joining these online little black books - just because I was sent an invite to do so (Oh shut up, LinkedIn is completely different!) - I talk of bebo.com and wayn.com ("Where Are You Now") among others I could name (but not right now eh?).

I am clearly the only person to think like this, but to me it seems more difficult to have to remember that I am a member of Not Another Networking Site (Hmmm, nans.com - I like it..not sure about the connotations though..), the password I need to remember, whether it uses a username or if my email address is the username - (con-sis-tenc-y people!). Please just use your email address to contact me, sure it's probably not as much fun if you're seventeen and single - but it makes life easier for people like me, who spend large tracts of time venting into cyberspace really (or should that read 'rarely'?) believing that people read this stuff.

Hmmm that was a bit rant-like wasn't it?

Ok, so to answer at least one good friend of mine in London who asks me what I'm up to - via email I might add, even though she's a member of Facebook - and clearly uninterested in the state of current world politics viz a viz climate change, peak oil and clean energy generation (What could me more engaging that that? ;-) I will finally attempt to pander to the equivalent of that cyber cliche that is the Travelling Email.

You know the email I'm talking about - where you're CC'd along with a humongous list of other people, so numerous in fact they cause your email client to snip the entire length of recipients for fear of it engulfing the entire screen. An email whose contents surely mentions the amount of booze to be purchased for the equivalent of Tesco's own brand beans but served in a blue receptacle that, if surveyed for Family Fortunes, most might better associate with peeing into than drinking out of.

Anyhow, as I think you're mostly all aware, I'm renovating my house at the moment and it is taking - and will probably continue to take - a ridiculously lengthy amount of time to complete. I've ripped out over a ton of rotten, bug infested wood, I have a six foot stack of the stuff in what should be a back garden and I've had to replace around 20m of rotted timber with new, treated timber. But by Jimney have I've now got some shape to me muscles! I used to have what a Dennis the Menace strip once described Walter the Softy's muscles as: Sparrow's Knee Caps. Not any more dudes.. Ok, so I 'm not David Banner's 'other half' but I'm not complaining either.

I'm trying to be as eco-aware as possible in these renovations. Other than the waste wood from said wood, which unfortunately I have to skip and send to landfill (Anyone heard of any other way of safely disposing of low grade builders waste?) I'm being pretty clean. I have nearly 50 square metres of woolen insulation sitting in alien-like pods in my lounge awaiting installation, I'll be fitting underfloor insulation and as I redecorate (with Resene Environemntal Choice Paint), I'll insulate the other walls in each room as I go. I'm also looking forward to the double glazing which is being installed on Wednesday. They took out my sash window a week and half ago, and frankly the view out onto a 6ft piece of ply just isn't as satisfying as next doors' southern facing wall used to be.

Once I have established this 'base point' of work - I call it the Northern Hemisphere Default...Not really, I just made that up - but because northern hemisphere homes are at least heated, or double glazed or insulated or all three - at time of construction or if not, then soon after. It's a shame the same can't be said here in NZ, although new building regs are improving the situation.

After I pulled down the external kitchen wall, I had to laugh at the shiny faced linen cloth insulation used. And that was it for insulation. (The principle is sound but isn't a touch on using wool, glass or rock fibre to insulate walls and ceilings with).

In other news, Hmmm - I'm not so keen on drinking these days - so news of antics on a Friday night no longer fill my euphemism lexicon, so that's about where that ends. I could mention what's in the news here: "Boy Racers" better known back in the UK as "Barrys", "Bazzers", "Neds" and "Kevs" as in, "See that twat in his XR2 Bazzing it up round the market square last night?".

In NZ, every town has a bit of a problem. Here you can be 15 years old, wearing a school uniform and drive your chums around in your old man's Holden V8 (A Vauxhall Senator to you).

It gets worse - once kids pass their tests, they'll get a big fat loan they'll never pay off and purchase a late model Subaru Impreza or Nissan Skyline, chip it, lower it and make a hifi out of the back seat.

There is a big problem with kids killing themselves and their mates by going 160km/h over a narrow bridge. This has been a problem for years, predating my first visit to NZ in '99, where the anti speeding ads were far more shocking than those I ever saw at home. But only now are the government and the police contemplating a re-tabling of the idea of mandatory insurance.

For this is why Barry and Kevin in Cambridge Market Square have had to drive 1991 Ford Fiestas all these years - because the cost of insurance prices them out of getting anything more powerful than a 1.3.

C'mon NZ, make the right choice...but I'll have to get rid of my machine though - 1.5L gas guzzling old girl that she is...

See you.