Archives for April 2006

Dragon pearl tea: green tea in Wellington

Way back in 1981 I was having a strange health problem and my doctor advised me to cut down on red wine (no problem, I didn’t drink it anyway), tea and coffee. I took the rather drastic action of removing both coffee and tea totally from my diet. Alcohol followed in about 1992. I endured […]

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Jupiter with binoculars

I stepped outside for a moment looked up to the East and thought: that’s a bright star! It couldn’t be Venus, because it was in the wrong direction — since Venus is closer to the sun than Earth is, it is always near the sun, which had set a few hours ago in the West. […]

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Waitangi Park skate area

Somewhere round about last June I was invited to be part of a 2 year medical study in the Greater Wellington Region. The researchers know that exercise is good for us, but apparently don’t have any good data. So, they’ve taken 1,000 sedentary, middle-aged women (yes, I qualify) and split us randomly into a control […]

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21 guns today

You’re sitting quietly, minding your own business, writing Chapter 9 of WordPress 2 : Visual QuickStart Guide, when you hear a loud bang. It’s the kind you hear when road workers drop those huge metal covers over holes in the road. Except then you hear another, and another, so you go outside to listen and […]

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Tui duet

Venus was bright in the East when I got up about 6.15 this morning so I took my binoculars out onto the deck for a look. Of course some light cloud came across precisely then, but I was able to check out Venus, nearby Uranus, Mercury and Neptune and the just-past-full moon. Apart from Venus […]

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The value of language

I’ve been working for a few hours while still in bed and the battery on my MacBook Pro is getting low. I transfer to the kitchen. The dog stands, mute, accusing. She’s had breakfast and can go in and out through the cat and dog door. It’s something else. Ah! her special FatzSac bean bed […]

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Wellington’s quality of living

An annual World-wide Quality of Living Survey, covering more than 350 cities has found Wellington to be the number 12 place to live in the world. The evaluation uses: …39 criteria, including political, social, economic and environmental factors, personal safety and health, education, transport, and other public services. Cities are ranked against New York as […]

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Working for a living

Some of us, like Ares here, don’t have to work for a living!

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Domination vs the creative

Apparently five women in conservative Saudi Arabia underwent sex change surgery abroad because they were sick of their male dominated and repressive society. Well, good on them, if that’s what they need to do. What I find particularly interesting is the response of the authorities: they graciously don’t arrest these ‘offenders’ and are worried about […]

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Wellington’s kerb dwellers

I’m extraordinarily busy these days completing my usual work and also writing a book, WordPress 2 : Visual QuickStart Guide. That’s why posts to this blog have been a little erratic. Here’s an interesting snippet though: Wikipedia has a page for Ben Hana, the almost naked guy who sleeps during the day on the kerb […]

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