half-pie

the spiders of summer, pt.1

2009-10-26T09:56:23Z

As we get further into spring, not only do we get outdoors more, and at the same time the outdoor fauna becomes more active.

For example, the House Hoppers are becoming more active on the outside of the house, and I caught both a male and this very beautiful female, surely as pulchritudinous as some cartoon representation of a homely, anthropomorphic spider:

The male was a cheeky wee chappie, like all his jumping spider kin – they remain my favourite kind of spider. I’m assuming he was a “he”, and of the same species, but I’m just not sure. His legs were much stripier, but I’m not enough of an arachnologist to have any idea what to look for.

Not so pretty was the large female tunnelweb spider Rebecca found under a sack of bark chips that had been undisturbed since last summer.

These are very common around our house; the most pleasing thing about them is that they are not wanderers and are seldom seen inside. However they are very large, from head to end about three centimeters not including the legs, and I never like being surprised by them when I’m in the garden. It is said they have a reasonable bite on them too, though I am not very willing to test it.

In my last posting, on the mantis hatchlings, I mentioned the large black-armed jumping spider we had inside. I took it outside in case we get any more hatchlings overnight tonight.

These, particularly the males, are common inside during the warmer months (and their cousins, a smaller brown stripy species, seem to be year-round indoor visitors). With their binocular vision they do like to turn to face objects of interest, which allows us to anthropomorphise their actions to a shameful degree. But whatever – these are cool spiders.

No doubt I’ll be taking more photos over summer, particularly on sunny days when I have a decent amount of light. You have been warned.

after three dozen we lost count...

2009-10-25T23:11:14Z

Mantis babies, we’re talking about.

Though we never did get around to removing the mantis ootheca (egg case) from the car – it’s still there now – Rebecca did find another one on a piece of rosemary she’d pruned back in Autumn; and since then it’s been sitting on the windowsill.

Finally, this week there was some action.

On Thursday when the blind was rolled up for the morning the sill was aswarm with about a dozen little mantises. Two got squashed flat in the roller blind, where they remain (I must get them out of there), but Rebecca and the girls released the rest outside.

They noticed a colour change occurring: when newly hatched, the mantises are a sort of translucent green; but over a couple hours they darken up and gain their juvenile brown stripe down their back.

On Friday: another six new mantises, and the girls took three each to school to show their friends and release there.

On Saturday: another six or so. One problem we didn’t think about with having the windowsill as a hatching space is spray residue from years of using flyspray there, not that we use much of the stuff. Worse was when they dropped to the floor by the french doors, a well used ant pathway and consequently fairly heavily sprayed by us over time. Any small mantis wandering there we would see die in about half an hour. Not so good.

Also problematical indoors: our other wandering fauna. At the moment there is a large black armed jumping spider roaming the area, who would like nothing better than mantis for breakfast. Not to mention the inevitable Pholcus that seem to be impossible to get rid of.

So I gathered our babies up fairly quickly and took them outside.

On Sunday: no new mantises. But today, there were another fourteen. These too, are now outside. Not that outside is any safer for them, but at least there’s no flyspray there.

The ootheca looks empty now. But I’m still wondering how so many managed to be packed in there!

vote for kārearea!

2009-10-18T09:24:50Z

Note: yes, I know that the polls have closed for this year… but I found this draft posting which I was going to enliven after the article I wrote for the Forest & Bird website went live. But for various reasons that didn’t happen for a of couple weeks after I wrote this, and then I forgot about it. For my own records, there’s also the Facebook page, and a posting on the Wellingtonista too… but as we know, in the end, the Kiwi won, though the Kārearea did get into the top 10 for the first time ever…

It’s time once again to vote for New Zealand’s Bird of the Year over on the NZ Forest & Bird website. Voting starts tomorrow and goes through until October. (I’ll get the link sorted out when the voting page comes live.)

This year I’m taking a more active role in all of this: I am officially the campaign manager for the New Zealand Falcon, the Kārearea.

As part of all this I’ve convinced one falcon to join Twitter. While he may have entirely the wrong idea about Twitter (to him I think it sounds like the perfect place to find food) he’s happy to talk, for now. Follow @kakarapiti.

I’ve also had to write a campaign opening “speech” for the Forest & Bird website…

Kārearea

No animal should to be anthropomorphised – but this is politics and I’m going to do it anyway: the falcon is a proud, fearless creature; as contemptuous of humans as it is casually brilliant at predation. The Kārearea, or New Zealand Falcon, absolutely deserves to be this year’s Bird of the Year.

It is our only remaining endemic member of the raptor family, a group with an interesting but mostly unfortunate story in these islands. There is the enduring ornithological mystery of why the peregine falcon, the world’s most widespread bird of prey, is not found in New Zealand. Could the locals have been too tough? There was the now-extinct Haast’s eagle, the fearsomely large cousin of the Kārearea, that would have been sufficiently large to carry off small children. Did explorer Charles Douglas shoot the last two of these in a trip up the Landsborough in the 1870s, or did he merely shoot the last two of the also now-extinct, but slightly smaller, Eyles’ Harrier?

Luckily the Kārearea is not as large and physically threatening as these birds, though it still has its moments. In defense of their nests the falcons are utterly fearless, and will remove hat, hair, and chunks of scalp tissue from any human daring to get too close. (There’s many a back-country musterer become unhorsed from accidentally riding across a nesting territory, though you’ll seldom hear tell of it. Their dogs get a fair share too: I’ve heard of one dog being unable to shake the falcon gripping its back until it jumped off a bluff into the nearest creek.)

Unlike most of our native birds, they actually seem contemptuous of humans. Once I tried walking up to one sitting on a fence post. It let me get to within about five metres of it before it gave a couple of wingbeats, enough to lift it over to the next fencepost; and all the while its eyes were on mine. I advanced on it, and again it beat to the next post. After a couple of repeats of this though, it took off, slowly flying away as if it felt I was of little interest and even less threat.

In hunting too, they are fearless predators, taking on much bigger birds on the wing. I’ve been told of watching a duck, trying to fly up out of a creek; it was high above the water when the falcon slammed into it from above. With talons jammed into its back and the weight of the falcon bearing down on it, all the duck could do was allow itself to be ridden down to the ground, and certain death.

Once, I walked across a ridgeline and paused for a rest, looking into some dead trees in the gully below, full of noisy roosting blackbirds. Over my right shoulder a dark silent shape sped past and down, at the last minute voicing its hunting cry “ki-ki-ki-ki-ki”. An upwards startle of birds met the falcon at equal height and a catch was made, as easy as that.

So by now you must be thinking: why should I vote for this steely-eyed assassin? Why should the Kārearea be 2009 Bird of the Year?

It’s simple. We need the wild.

New Zealand is not a garden: it needs the feral and free along with the pretty and cute. It needs a hint of danger, sharp of eye and red of claw, to leaven the sweetness of voice and plumage of the other candidates.

Yet there’s fewer and fewer falcons about, with the usual catalogue of introduced predators, together with newer threats like power lines, reducing their population. Falcons need our help.

And, help given, think of the benefits of a larger, stable population! Even us city dwellers might start to see more of them as permanent residents, more than just the occasional visitors Blenheim, Palmerston North and Christchurch have enjoyed recently. And while possibly not everybody would be happy to see them, to many people they’d be a fantastic addition to the avian fauna of our cities.

A resident falcon could:

sort out, permanently, that rooster next door that wakes you up in the morning;
dispose of those hooligan sparrows destroying your cherry flowers;
scare off that juvenile tuī that mimics a car alarm;
render to pile of windblown feathers the starlings nesting in your roof; and
clean its beak on that blackbird that crapped elderberries on your clean washing.

Bring it on, I say. Vote Karearea!

So. I think you should vote too. Hopefully for the kārearea; but then again it’s all about having a little fun and raising awareness, so vote for whatever you like. Just vote though, OK?

I am a Paleontologist

2009-10-17T04:01:02Z

I just can’t stop singing this song: it’s insanely catchy, and the kids love it too:

It’s from They Might Be Giants‘ new children’s CD of science-themed tracks, which arrived for us from Amazon earlier in the week. Recommended!

remember what this was like?

2009-10-11T08:49:46Z

So, look back past this recent wintry weather, and remember what early spring was like:

Feels so long ago now, doesn’t it.

Typekit, and Windows web font rendering

2009-09-22T08:24:20Z

If you are at all interested in the use of various typefaces on webpages, you will have noticed that most web pages seem to use a very abbreviated set of faces. This is because typically to see the web page the way the designer intended, site visitors must have the same set of fonts on their machines as the designer has specified to be used on the website. In practice this means that the designers can only count on a very few number of fonts being available to all their users – so they specify these in order to obtain a consistent experience across their userbase. This means fonts like Arial, Times, Georgia, and Verdana.

Typekit seeks to overturn this rather dull state of affairs by allowing designers to license new fonts that are then downloaded into their users’ browsers at the time the website is viewed. It’s a great idea, and implemented quite nicely through the addition of two javascripts to each website page, and some configuration on the Typekit website.

I had run across Typekit a few months back, and signed up to try it out. The invitation came through last week (as it did for many people) so I gave it a go over the weekend.

I was up and running within a matter of minutes, having selected a couple of new fonts I liked, and then further adjusted my stylesheet to make their sizes a little bigger. Job done, I thought.

Not so fast, unfortunately. It turns out there are still a few problems with this approach.

Uneven browser support: while most “modern” browsers are supported (i.e., major browsers newer than IE6) some important newer browsers like Google Chrome are not supported. Luckily you can specify a fallback font set to use for these browsers, which I did.
Costs money: yeah yeah, I shouldn’t complain about this. In any case, there is a free version that allows you to use two fonts on a single website: and that’s what I was using.
No support for non-latin characters: a problem as I try to spell Māori words correctly.
Many fonts look like crap in Windows.

This last one was the killer. I really was quite shocked to see the difference. (The images below will open in a new window.)

I’m not sure exactly what the problem is here: whether it’s Windows font rendering; or the fonts themselves for not being adequately drawn for the screen; or mine for choosing unsuitable fonts for my website.

Either way, I can’t use them like this. Other people with a better eye for font selection, and more time to test out what looks best might have a better experience.

So to my non-professional eye, Typekit is not ready yet. Full marks for effort, but I’ll come back to it in a year or so and see how it looks then.

lazy sunday

2009-09-20T08:24:34Z

Usually on a day like today ~~we’d~~ I’d just sloth around. It’s Sunday, after all, and by the time I’d have removed the piles of cat crap from the lawn it would be too dark to mow it anyway.

Not today though. Today was all action. The kids were up early as one of Bella’s friends was staying overnight. After Bella’s friend went home, we headed into town for brunch with the Wellingtonista. It was a little bit unusual in that this time partners and kids were invited as well; however, kids being catching, they were placed safely down the far end where they couldn’t disturb people too much. James‘ Milo brought along Blokus along, which we had not played before, and he beat us comfortably while we waited for lunch.

Later on, we headed down to the stadium for the football.

We’d been prepared for cold, like good parents, but the direct sun beating in on us was extremely warm and bright. This is normally a good thing, but not (bad, bad parents!) if you are without hats and sunscreen and sunglasses.

I was still feeling a slightly boozy halo of wellbeing from lunch, and I think this, coupled with an over-stimulated sense of the occasion, made me go and buy hats for the whole family (I think this is the same impulse that makes you buy an expensive t-shirt at a gig – I am all-too susceptible there as well).

Super styley, eh?

Well, I can’t say that I like my new hat that much (and Rebecca doesn’t seem a huge fan of hers either), but at least I have something to wear to the next game. (There were less obvious styles that in my haste I overlooked in favour of an expression of tribalism.) The girls love theirs, so that’s something.

The game itself: well, it was as good as the last one we went to, except for the ending, in which the opposition team, notable only for a very famous ex-Liverpool player being the captain, scored an equaliser in the last minute of extra time. I’m not really what you’d called an informed watcher of sport, though I enjoy watching it live in life (over live on TV).

I also discovered that the one drawback of daytime football matches is that small kids don’t just fall asleep when they’re bored: they have to be kept entertained with food and drink. That is what parents are for.

Anyway, after all that we went to a drama production that one of Bella’s friends was in, which was charming, clever, and also concise; this last virtue being most welcome given the day’s various excitements.

And so the weekend was satisfactorily completed.

waikanae beach

2009-09-06T09:38:09Z

We had yesterday and today at a beach house in Waikanae, lucky us, to help celebrate Bella’s ninth birthday. And the weather could not have been better.

Well, it was pretty good all over the country really. Just look at this:

Yes, that’s Mt Ruapehu, around 180 km away (we could also see Taranaki, though he was harder to find). The skies were clear for hundreds of kilometres in every direction.

And while the air temperature was not that warm, the sun was hot enough today to encourage the kids into their togs for a paddle, and for Helen, with whom we were staying, to haul out the sea kayak for rides.

They were considerably more keen than I was.

Though last night as I stood in the setting sun on the balcony overlooking the beach, glass in hand, even I was thinking about a little adventure on the water:

Probably just the wine talking, that was.

garden workers

2009-09-04T10:29:04Z

The workers we have in our garden at the moment have hairy arses.

Not through some horticultural equivalent of builders’ crack, but because that’s just they way they are:

I should be out digging over the potato patch or something. But hard work is always best observed rather than partaken of. So I have contented myself with taking a few photos of the workers instead.

We seem to be having another early spring here, with the cherry tree in full blossom a week earlier than in 2005 and 2006.

This picture was taken this morning from more or less the same view as our autumn picture in mid-May.

I really like how that particular tree, which dominates the view out our front window, really marks the passing of seasons for us. In spring, it flowers beautifully, keeping the tuī, waxeyes, and sparrows in high energy good-lovin’ food; in early summer it fruits, providing plenty of meals for kererū and blackbirds; throughout summer its leaves provide us cool shade for the paddling pool; and in autumn the colour of its leaves warn of winter to come. And in winter, it is bare, letting past the maximum of sun and light to the house.

Yes, I can wholeheartedly recommend a large flowering cherry as a useful garden plant. And these guys would recommend it too:

Previous springtimes:

21 September 2008
Oh no! I have a hole in my list for 2007!
10 September 2006
11 September 2005
29 September 2004
2 October 2003
22 September 2002

Powershop: the first month

2009-08-31T11:13:44Z

About six months ago I asked the question: Will Powershop save me money? Based on my projections at the time I concluded that the savings weren’t really enough to me jump personally, though I was, and remained, interested in the concept.

Eventually curiosity got the better of me, and I joined up anyway. I was satisfied that I’d save at least some money, and so long as I handled the details Rebecca was happy for me to go for it.

I was pretty impressed with Powershop‘s signup process¹. Once I was into the website proper—after two and a half weeks looking at the screen you see here while everyone waited for my old power company to sort themselves out—there was a lot to take in. It didn’t take too long though before I’d explored all the areas and was ready to make a purchase. Which I did. And it turned out there were some significant savings to be had.

There seems to me to be two parts to saving money with Powershop:

via cheaper unit prices; and
through becoming more aware of your power use habits, and using that awareness to use less power.

I’m pretty sure that I’ve saved money on both counts in the last month.

The first is relatively easy to calculate. I have come up with a consolidated unit price as charged by my previous supplier of 21.81 cents per unit² – a bit like a break-even price. Any time I purchase power from Powershop that is cheaper than this, I am saving money; and conversely of course, every time I purchase power from Powershop that is more expensive than this, I am losing compared to my previous supplier.

Six months ago when I first looked at Powershop, I had thought to be losing money at this time of year; and in fact the price of winter power that Powershop was offering back then was 22.49 cents per unit. This is to be expected: demand rises in the wintertime; and this causes a rise in the wholesale prices. Come summertime however, we would expect the Powershop prices to have dropped back significantly below my break-even price.

What actually happened though was more interesting. With the southern lakes full, and the month of August being mild weather-wise, supply of power was plentiful and demand was weakish. You can see this for yourself by looking at the Electricity Commission’s Wholesale Market reports. The graph I’ve lifted (below) from the 23 August report shows that wholesale power prices this time last year were up to 20 times higher than they are now³, and that on many days, demand this time last year was higher.

So Powershop has been able to pass on some of these savings to its customers through cheaper unit prices. I’ve calculated that over the month and a half of power I’ve purchased so far on Powershop, I’ve saved $37.52; a saving which does not include the $50 joining promo I managed to find⁴. This is unexpected, and pleasing⁵ – I had expected to be saving only around $70 over the entire year!

The second source of savings, those relating to behavioural changes that cause us to consume less, is less easy to measure. While the obvious measure of our behavioural changes would be the size of any decrease in the number of units consumed each day, compared to previous years, this figure is also affected by externalities like the weather, and water temperatures going into the hot water cylinder. But what the hell, let’s do some calculations now.

During August it turned out that we used considerably less power than we do usually. Our long-term (last six years) daily average consumption for July and August is 37.1 units per day (with it being closer to 40 in the last two years). For most of August this year, we’ve been around 30-32 units per day. I know this because Powershop provides a handy graph of our daily usage, based on the meter readings I have become mildly obsessed with entering every couple of days or so.

While much of this could be due to the warmer weather, switching to Powershop has made us more aware of our usage. We’ve been turning off lights, and heated towel rails, for example, and we recently decided (unrelated to the switch) that our girls were old enough now not to need their bedrooms heated at night⁶ all the time.

We’ll be better placed to measure the effect of any behavioural changes at the end of our first year with Powershop—we probably need to see some ups and downs of weather to help average out those externalities—but I’m convinced that Powershop has altered our behaviour for the better. And that also, is pleasing⁷.

So, to summarise then: we’ve switched. Our savings, even after a month, are very real. We’ve modified our behaviour to use less power, though the effect of this is, as yet, indeterminate. But overall, I’m very happy with my Powershop experience.

¹ The website couldn’t be easier – all you need is a power bill, and optionally your bank account number (they have online Direct Debit setup, if you wish to pay that way, something I had thought could not be done). Once you are in and committed, they give a clear indication of when they think you will change over; and they communicate with you frequently and appropriately during that period. There’s also a telephone help desk staffed by real people who don’t seem to make you wait; and in any case you can email them if you’d rather. I think that other companies with online presences need to take a close look at Powershop, and be taking notes. It’s one of the best signup processes I’ve ever experienced.

² Your figure will be different – here’s how I calculated mine. To compare what I would have paid with my previous supplier (Meridian) with what I’m paying now with Powershop, I need to convert their prices, a mix of fixed daily and unit prices, into something comparable to Powershop’s unit-only prices. On my last Meridian bill, the unit price was 20.66 cents (including the Electricity Commission Levy); while the daily charge was 96.74 cents. Looking at the two calendar years 2007-8 we used 19,741 units in total. Using this information, and assuming that we’ll always receive the 10% “prompt payment discount” that our previous supplier offered (bloody rort!), I get an estimated consolidated unit price for our household of 21.81 cents per unit.

³ Sometimes I think that smoothing out this excessive price volatility is really the only added value service regular power companies perform. And they charge an awfully large premium for this service.

⁴ If you hunt around you should be able to find one of these – I was going to link to the TradeMe promo but it expires tonight.

⁵ One thing to remember though: if next winter is dry, then all this year’s savings could go out the window. Don’t spend them too soon!

⁶ For which I had purchased two of those brilliant Honeywell home thermostats, which we had set to 15°C year around.

⁷ I think this alone is worth switching for, and also that anyone who thinks of themselves as green should sign up to Powershop to gain access to their monitoring tools.