Quit my job yesterday, after 23 years with the same firm. The company's changed over the last few years (since well before Covid - anyone else noticed that 2020-21 don't count when talking about "a few years ago"?) between the previous CEO losing his way and ultimately quitting, and a new guy coming on board and bringing his team with him. My role within it has also changed over that period, into one I'm not satisfied with. I could have fought to get back into a role I wanted, but ultimately I came to the conclusion that even if they gave me the perfect role, the company culture is now not one I want to be part of, and given the individuals involved, I can't see that changing. So I'm out.

I'm glad to have made the call, and hopefully it'll have me feeling better about life in general in a few months - I've been finding myself getting steadily more negative about all sorts of things of late. But meantime there's a grieving process to go through - this job's been part of me for almost half my life, and while I'm not sad to be going, I'm sad it's come to this.

No idea what happens next - I don't have a job to go to. I'm going to take a few months out to decompress, shitpost a bit more, and do some landscaping around the house: there's some big jobs required to finish off the massive project we took on with this property four years ago, and I've been deferring paying someone to deal with them because I had a feeling that at some point soon I may have more time than money. After that, maybe a similar tech management role with a different company, maybe get back on the tools, which TBH I enjoyed more than I ever have management; the only issue is money. Or maybe get back into the startup scene - I joined my soon-to-be-ex employer as employee #6, and the best days were the early days when we were making it up as we went along and everything seemed possible: I'd love to get that feeling again. I'm not overly worried about finding something when I decide to look - the job market seems to be booming even despite the looming recession, and worst case we can get by on my wife's salary with a few lifestyle compromises.

A reminder of more carefree days (or at least less thoughtful ones) for your time.

<note: this has the potential to turn political but that's not the intent. I was just reminded today of a so-Kiwi quirk of NZ's Parliamentary system that y'all might find amusing>

The US has the Liberty Bell. The UK has the Crown Jewels. New Zealand has ..... The Biscuit Tin of Destiny.

In our system, along I expect with most parliamentary systems, not all law is created according to the government's agenda. Any Member of Parliament here is able to draft their own bill on any matter they feel strongly enough about to bother, and submit it to Parliament to be debated and then voted on like any other legislation. If it passes - which mostly it doesn't - it becomes law.

Aside from allowing random trivia or pet hobby horses to come to Parliament's attention, this is also commonly the way that legislation on "moral" topics like marriage, abortion, euthanasia or homosexual law reform comes about here. Political parties often won't want to put their name behind something too controversial, but there's usually an MP who feels strongly enough about it to submit the legislation privately - often with behind the scenes support from MPs on both sides to draft a compromise bill that has a chance of passing - and if it is drawn in the ballot, the government can declare it a "conscience vote" which means MPs are free to vote against party positions, insulating the government from criticism whatever the outcome.

Since there are generally many, many more of these "Private Member's Bills" in the queue than can get discussed in the one afternoon every two weeks which Parliament schedules for them, there needs to be a system for deciding which ones get debated. In New Zealand, the process is by lottery: tokens representing the bill are drawn at random by one of Parliament's officials whenever there's a vacant slot.

Because this is New Zealand and we don't go for no hi-falutin' ways, the tokens are repurposed Bingo counters, and the container from which they are drawn is a biscuit tin (cookie tin for the Americans). These were pressed into service because they happened to be lying around 30 years ago at the time the ballot system was put in place, and have remained in service ever since, as has the paper label taped onto the tin.

Due to this, the Private Members Bill system is informally known here as "Biscuit Tin Democracy" and the tin in question, whose official home is a bookshelf in a parliamentary back office, is variously called "The Biscuit Tin of Democracy" or "The Biscuit Tin of Destiny".

(

Summertime here, so prawns have been barbied and beers have been drunk for the lunchtime warmup session, and now the younger members of the family are off for a surf while the rest of us get in a bit of digestive stupor before the serious eating and drinking begins this evening.

Hope everyone has a good one.

Went out for dinner (Korean fusion. Bit of a gamble but paid off - best meal I’ve had in ages) and stayed the night in the same hotel we spent our wedding night in. It hasn’t aged too well (who has?), but it’s still got a pretty good view.

Unfortunately this year they’ve cancelled it, but normally this weekend is Pride Parade, which we hadn’t realised when we set the date (also didn’t think through the implications of it being the first weekend after Valentine’s Day - ever tried to buy roses just after Valentines?). On our wedding night we walked the half mile or so from the venue to here through a massive street party: Pride was a huge event in Auckland back then. Want to have a really fun time? Wander at midnight through a street full of drunk and happy drag queens while wearing a wedding dress and a morning suit. Biggest planning fail of the whole wedding was not taking a camera with us for the walk to the hotel .

NZ has done well at containment, but we’re doing a lousy job at vaccination - only 15% of the eligible population have had even one shot. I guess there just hasn’t been the sense of urgency here, plus supply’s been a problem because we don’t have a lot of leverage with pharmaceutical companies and anyway the government’s only approved the Pfizer one.

Anyway, my number just came up, so I’m now sitting in the recovery area waiting to see if I keel over.

So far, at least, I’m feeling no urge to use Bing. So that’s good.

Here in New Zealand, we're still living in 2020: we're in a hard shelter-in-place lockdown at the moment due to Delta breaching the border quarantine. Seems to be working so far, but it's an open question how sustainable an elimination strategy is going to be vs Delta and whether we can hold it together till vaccination rates are high enough to open up. But that's another story and not the point of this tale.

Anyway, as a consequence, it's not currently possible to buy anything I can't get from the supermarket or pharmacy: hard lockdown in NZ means hard - everything's closed. Which is a PITA - it's amazing how many jobs I've started over the last couple of weeks that have stalled because nipping down to the hardware or auto parts store and grabbing a necessary widget isn't an option.

So of course this is the time that the shrub which had hooked itself around the antenna cable of our internet connection (we're on cellular broadband via a Yagi antenna bolted to the roof) managed to yank the cable out through the wall in a storm, breaking the connector on the inside end. Net result: no internet, which as I'm sure most of you remember from last year, is a major crisis when you're confined to quarters.

Fortunately, my box of "cables which I have no idea what the fuck they're for or where they came from and I really should get rid of" was able to ride in and save the day. I'm pretty sure I've never previously owned a device with an SMA format coax connector, but nonetheless I do have a short cable with an SMA plug. A bit of chocolate block splicing and an antenna cable rerouted through a window and connected directly to the router later, and Netflix is back online - yay! It's ugly, but it'll do till electronics stores are open again.

It's nice to occasionally get rewarded for never throwing crap out

In today’s edition of “Life With Mrs Distraxi’s Petting Zoo”, it always amuses me seeing the llamas coming up over the crest of the hill - Nessie would be proud.

We’re now entering the summer dry season here, and the fungal infection facial eczema is a risk: it’s a killer, and camelids are even more vulnerable to it than sheep. The solution is to dose them with zinc, which protects them from liver damage if they get infected. This means they get a daily helping of zinc-laced food pellets. Summer, with its need for daily feeds, is the only time llamas get high maintenance: the rest of the year they can be pretty much left to themselves if you feel like it.

Fortunately they love the pellets - you’ve only got to head out into the paddock and shake the bucket and long necks start to rise over the sea of grass in all directions and make a beeline for you. The trick then is to get one llama assigned per bowl before grumpiness ensues.

There’s inevitably a certain amount of grumpiness once the fastest eaters finish theirs though. Ears lowered right back against the neck as you can see in the photos below is llama for “get out of my face or things are gonna get ugly”.

In this particular instance, it was only going to end one way. Pico, the paler one on the right, is our alpha male: if he wanted the bowl, he was gonna get the bowl. The two young girls are just trying to figure out their place in the pecking order - just like with humans, kids can get away with anything: teenagers not so much.

Meantime, in the handling paddock, Colonel Mustard, a young recently gelded male who’s being kept isolated till he forgets what it was like to have balls, is getting bullied by Charlie the Canada goose (Mustard, by by the way, is pure white, despite all evidence to the contrary. He does love him a dust bath).

Despite the fact that Mustard’s full on ready to murder any male llama he can get to, Charlie scares the shit out of him - it’s taken him 15 minutes to work up the nerve to get close enough to eat from his bucket. Charlie knows it too, the little bastard: he’s only hanging around there because he knows Mustard doesn’t want him to. Charlie’s a piece of work. Although this is the new relaxed and chill Charlie - we got him a couple of girlfriends a month or two back. Before then he was waaaay angrier. He wasn’t sharing a paddock with Mustard back then, but I expect if he had been there’d have been bird on overgrown sheep violence rather than just some light intimidation: Charlie doesn’t really do backing down.

One of his girlfriends has decided she’s a duck, however. She always hangs with the duck flock rather than the other geese, and the ducks seem quite happy to accept her.

In closing, have a Guinea fowl who’s got trapped on the other side of the fence from its flock and is now in a major panic. Guinea fowl are dumber than toast - they’re hilarious. YOU CAN FLY, YOU IDIOT!

For the DT-ers: like people have been saying, it’s an off-topic blog . I’ve been known to post about cars, but I also do camelid content.

In Dublin for a conference, and since it’s a nice afternoon and Dublin’s a pedestrian-friendly city, I decided to walk the mile or so home from the venue (the RDS) to my hotel. Which it turns out took me through the embassy district, and some of what I assume is the swankiest residential real estate in the city. Amongst a truly offensive density of Mercs, BMWs, Bentleys and Rollers parked in driveways (and pop quiz: if you have matching his and hers Rolls Royces, who gets the Ghost and who gets the Wraith? And why didn’t you save up a little longer and get a Phantom?), I found a couple of houses whose residents are clearly members of our tribe.

This place was sandwiched between the two-Rolls household and one with a Bentley and an S Class:

…and this was street parked outside:

Then a couple of hundred yards later:

@old-busted-hotness That debate got played out publicly here after a trans woman (Laurel Hubbard) was selected for our weightlifting team - a sport in which you'd think starting off as a biological male would give you quite an advantage. I was initially somewhat anti, having more or less the same concerns you've expressed above. But by the time the various people who actually know some stuff about the subject had weighed in, I was totally OK with it.

Factors worth thinking about (note - this all relates to people who've had the full gender reassignment program - drugs, surgery etc: "I self-identify as" is a different conversation. Also the points I make below related to trans women, but the same arguments are applicable to trans men):

• Muscle has a pretty short "life", and gender reassignment takes years to complete and stabilize to the extent that you can be a competitive athlete. By the time you've gone through it, all the testosterone is long since washed away, and any muscular development driven by it will have faded: what muscle you have will be "female normal", both in amount and distribution (inasmuch as any Olympic athlete is normal). The same applies to hemoglobin levels, which are typically higher in males and drive higher cardio performance.
• You will still have a male skeleton, which is advantageous in many sports (though disadvantageous in others). But against that you will no longer have the right musculature to take advantage of it (see above): as well as having generally less muscle, females develop muscle in different areas than males to take advantage of the different leverage provided by their skeleton. General consensus is this "wrong gear ratio" effect outweighs the advantage of the skeleton itself in most circumstances.
• In sports where size and weight are an advantage, such as wrestling and weightlifting, competitors are segregated by weight anyway. A trans woman is more likely to be competing in a higher weight class, but once she's there she'll be competing against others with a similar profile so has no advantage. Hubbard, for example, competed in the heavyweight class but was 20kg lighter than her heaviest competitor.
• Athletics at this level is as much a mind game as a body game, and trans competitors are at an obvious disadvantage here. Between any psychological history they may have (and few people get as far as gender reassignment without some baggage accumulated along the way), and the discrimination and sense of not fitting in they're likely to experience as athletes, they have an uphill battle to reach and maintain the same mental pitch as their non-trans competitors
• Olympic-class athletes are pretty much by definition freaks of nature: NONE of them, cis or trans, conform to norms for the rest of humanity anyway. They are significantly further away from normal than the sex-to-sex spread: the world's fastest woman is slower than the world's fastest man, but she's faster than 99.99+% of the male population. The variation between cis and trans is considerably less than the difference between really good and Olympic good, never mind between average and Olympic good. Sport allows for one person to have an advantage over another - I'm not a professional basketballer because (as well as being an unfit slob with lousy hand-eye co-ordination) I'm not 6'8" tall: LeBron James has an advantage over me. What it doesn't allow for is an unfair or disproportionate advantage, and evidence to date doesn't support the idea that trans athletes have such an advantage. If they did, the trans athletes who have been competing at lower levels of sport for some time now would be cleaning up all over, and they're not. If trans people were competitive in proportion to their prevalence in the population, never mind disproportionately competitive, there'd be about 50 of them hammering at the doors of the Olympics, not one or two.

A counter argument to all that is that Hubbard transitioned fairly late in life and was a serious weightlifter before she transitioned as well as after. As a male, she wasn't good enough to make the Olympic qualification mark, but as a female she was. So one could argue that being trans gave her an advantage. But then you'd have to ask whether as "a woman trapped in a man's body" she was mentally able to compete to her full potential as a male and whether it's removing that disadvantage that's allowed her to step up to Olympic class. And down the rabbit hole we go...

Hubbard, by the way, washed out early after failing to make her first three lifts at a weight well below her personal best, illustrating my point above about it being a mind game.

The GPS on our JDM Leaf has never really coped with the fact that it's 6000 miles from Japan, and insists on trying to place us somewhere that it has a map for. And we've never figured out how to turn off the nav warnings. We've therefore become accustomed to having a nice Japanese lady (who we call Motoko) burble at us at random intervals warning of railroad crossings and other nonexistent hazards.

This is a new low though - normally it at least manages to place us on an actual road. And more disturbingly, Motoko hasn't warned me I'm about to drown. Maybe she's starting to suspect we've kidnapped her .

I'd say "go home Motoko, you're drunk", except that clearly she has no clue where home is.

@Gabriella Who is Fiona (“Fi”) Nally and why should we care?

https://mobile.twitter.com/fi_nally

@WasGTIthenGTOthenNOVAthenGTInowA4 said in Why Yes, It Does Rev to 20,000:

If this is not the silhouette of a rebel fighter in Star Wars, it should be.

@entwerfen

Obvious answer is obvious (to me at least). No swiveling headlights in 63, but perfection is an offence against Allah, so I can live with that.

Or maybe a mk2 Jag: a first-year one would probably have been in my price range at that point.

@pip-bip I’m pretty sure I staged that scene using a Tonka toy and a Dinky toy when I was about 5.

@DSM_OR_DIE Dooooo eeet!

Cappuccinos are great - all the fun of a Miata PLUS all the fun of a kids’ pedal car, in one handy package. As long as you are short enough to see under the header rail: I’m not, which is the only reason I didn’t buy the one I looked at.

@ash78 said in Happy Birthday Erwin Schrödinger:

Cat box thread!!

If the cat demolishes the box, is it still quantum?

@Future-Next-Gen-S2000-Owner Autopilot and satellite telemetry, according to Wiki. That was my first question too…

@ZHP-Sparky-the-5th said in How much for a Hammer?:

GAUDY.

Yup. Iron fist in a velvet glove doesn’t work when the velvet has Elvis painted on it. Make mine a saloon, thanks, and hold the bling.

@derp See my avatar. The sunglasses are specific to the Project 7 version of the F Type.

@bison78 There’s no kill like overkill . Though in fairness to @EssExTee, quoting a bunch of non US market cars from the worlds quirkiest car company at him doesn’t exactly annul his point about the Jalopnik article.