half-pie max

onset of fever

2009-06-25T10:43:04Z

I’ve been a faithful user of Shaun Inman‘s Mint, a ravishingly beautiful and terrifically useful self-hosted stats application for websites, for nearly four years now. Even though I do have Google Analytics installed as well¹, Mint is what I refer to most often: it’s always up-to-date and it quickly and concisely shows me what I want to know.

Mint showed a really interesting combination of design, UI skills and über-coding ability all rolled up together, and I’d wondered what Mr Inman would do next.

That next thing is Fever°, an RSS feed reader. Fever° is unusual in that it’s an application that you need to host on your own webserver, much as you might self-host a WordPress blog. It also costs money.

I’ve bought it, and been using it for almost a week, and I can say that it is money well spent.

As you’d expect, it’s lovely to look at, and works perfectly well as a feed reader. It has lots of keyboard shortcuts, and plays nicely with Fluid.app. A particularly nice aspect of Fever° is the iPhone version of the site: it’s perfectly optimised to the screen, and when saved as a webclip² behaves almost identically to a native application – even down to being chromeless and having a startup screen.

But the most interesting thing about Fever° is the splitting of feeds into two broad (though not necessarily exclusive) categories: “Sparks”, and “Kindling” (you’ll get used to these names fairly quickly). Kindling are all your must-read feeds, the things you follow religiously.

Sparks are all those interesting feeds you’ve subscribed to but may be just too high-volume to read all of. What Fever° does is scan these, together with the Kindling feeds, to detect the most “important” or most linked items; assigning and ranking these with a rating based on human body temperatures and placing these your “hot” list for priority reading.

I’ve started using this… but I’ve come to the conclusion that I need a lot more feeds in the Sparks category. I’m open to suggestions.

One worry with self-hosted applications is installation. If you host your own website on your own domain, you are probably mostly there already. The first step, once you’ve created a database on your webserver for Fever° to use, is to download and run the Fever° compatibility suite. You have to do this, and your webserver pass the test, before you can purchase Fever°³. But if you get this far, you are actually 90% done on the installation – because once you enter the activation code into the compatibility suite, the rest of Fever° installs itself.

This has to be one of the most painless web application installation processes I have ever experienced. I hope other developers are taking notes.

The next step is to load it up with feeds. It was easy to import my feedlist from Google Reader. The next additions were the various shared items lists from friends in Reader; and after that I thought about some suitable additions to Sparks. High-volume and interesting link blogs seem like a good idea, so I added in Slashdot, Digg, Metafilter, among others. Done!

So… why use Fever° when Google Reader already does this? And why spend US$30 when there’s cheaper ways of doing it? Here’s three reasons:

I already use and love Inman’s Mint. I therefore had a pretty good idea of what Inman, a genius, idiosyncratic, solo designer-developer, had the ability to come up with. I like supporting genius, idiosyncratic, solo designer-developers (Loren Brichter is another).
I like self-hosted applications, up to a point, but I also like not depending too much on any one provider for anything. (To put it another way: I don’t want Google to be a single point of failure in my life.) So a plurality of web applications is A Good Thing in my book.
Fever° is cool, and I fully expect it to be further developed in interesting ways. For example, sharing links between friends is one big strength of apps like Twitter, Friendfeed and Reader. Something similar for Fever° would be brilliant.

Which brings me to Fever°‘s annoyances. It’s only a version 1.0 application, but even so I’m finding very little to carp about – in fact the following just seems like whining:

On the iPhone, external pages resulting from tapping on outward links appear in a little frame above the page that allows you to easily go back into your Fever° session. The problem is that when you do, it’s displayed very very small and you have to force a screen redraw by changing the orientation of the iPhone to horizontal and back again.
In a web browser, if there’s a refresh of the feed you are reading, you lose the article you are on. Of course, you can press “u” to see all unread items, so all is not lost.

But those are just minor things. Fever°⁴ is a ravishingly beautiful and terrifically useful self-hosted RSS Reader. You should really have a good look, even if you don’t buy it: a brush with the product of genius is always inspiring.

¹ People who write blogs are nothing if not obsessed about the number and nature of their readers; and Google Analytics provides a more common basis for comparison. How big is yours (audience, I mean).

² By tapping the “+” you can save a Fever° icon to your home screen – just as you can for many other websites, though with varying levels of eye-candy.

³ Presumably learning from his experiences with Mint, this compatibility suite part of the install makes absolutely sure that no-one who has paid money for Fever can fail to install it because of some non-standard server configuration (and it would seem that Mr Inman has seen it all with his experiences supporting Mint).

⁴ I’ve overdone it on the ° ° °. They do get tiresome, don’t they.

in me shed

2009-06-16T10:44:05Z

I couldn’t pass up this video.

The Punks Not Dad album is now available on iTunes.

[If you have trouble with this you can always ask the kids how to do it.]

XT for the iPhone?

2009-06-07T10:17:44Z

It’s been pretty hard to miss the fact that Telecom NZ have a new mobile network, XT. It’s all 3G, the latest and currently fastest of the mobile “generations”, and represents quite a step up from the old CDMA network that they put in at the beginning of this decade¹.

Telecom’s major rival, Vodafone New Zealand, also has a 3G network that uses pretty much similar technology. The difference lies mainly in the frequency bands used to carry the cellular signals. XT is mostly on the 850MHz band with the centre of some large cities on the 2100MHz band. Vodafone however uses 2100MHz in most of the major towns and cities with another band, 900MHz, as fill for the rest of the country.

From what I understand, 2100MHz is less able to penetrate buildings, and the cell coverage areas are smaller. On the other hand, both the 850MHz and 900MHz bands can deliver fast internet connections to sad geeks taking a dump in toilets that happen to be located in the middle of massed steel-reinforced concrete high-rise ~~faraday cages~~ buildings². The contra to this wonder of technology is that the capacity of the two lower frequency bands is much poorer (which accounts for why Telecom is supplementing its network with 2100MHz sites in some cities).

Which brings me to my phone. It’s a second generation iPhone, as my three regular readers will by now have tired of me talking about, and it’s currently loaded with a Vodafone SIM card. The 2nd gen iPhone can receive both the 2100 and 850MHz bands, the latter of course being unusable on Vodafone. When out of range of the 3G 2100MHz band it will drop back to an older, slower, 2G technology. Unfortunately this can happen quite a lot: on the bus to work; down the other end of my building; over the hill in the Wairarapa etc etc. Cue much whining.

So of course, I had to try a XT SIM card to see if I should switch over. Data speeds were faster. Of course they were: as the reporter from the NBR put it, “the cellular equivalent of being able to zoom up a new motorway before the ribbon’s cut” (or in this case, just after the ribbon-cutting ceremony).

And 3G coverage was better. Of course it was: the iPhone isn’t capable of receiving Vodafone’s 900MHz band that would match the coverage of XT’s 850MHz band.

After some reflection, I decided that that speed and coverage issues, while important, were not the whole story when it came to making a decision to switch cellular providers. There’s price; and there’s the rest of my communications business; and there’s some indefinable other stuff that’s the sum of my attitudes to and experience with both companies.

With price, XT has an advantage. Slightly. About $4 per month if I try and make something that matches what I have now from Vodafone; and to get that level of pricing I have to have my home phone on Telecom. If I want to avoid that, I need to get the next mobile plan up; and this would make the XT plan $14 per month more than my current plan.

This brings me to an interesting marketing device that both telcos employ: a mixture of loyalty bonuses and cross-product marketing. Both Vodafone and Telecom sell home phone, mobile, and broadband internet services; and typically if you get one service, you get a discount on the next one. So I save $10 per month on my broadband by having my toll-calls with Vodafone; and if I add in local calling and line rental I can get even faster, cheaper internet. Horizontally too: calls between mobiles on the same network can be had cheaper; Rebecca pays $6 per month for unlimited calls from her Vodafone mobile to mine; and I don’t have to pay the $6 at all for the reverse as I’ve been given that as a loyalty bonus when I re-signed up last year.

I’d lose all this if I shifted to XT. And to get the most benefit from changing over I’d have to switch over the whole home communications stack, and then buy a new mobile phone for Rebecca too (her SonyEricsson k770i won’t run on 850MHz).

Can’t see it happening.

So we’re left with the last criterion: the indefinable one. And I have to admit, I just like Vodafone more. Telecom aren’t quite the lumbering idiots of yore, but I’m still not really a fan. I’ve had more experience with Vodafone; some good times with their people when I worked for a corporate client of theirs; and smoother runs with their technology roaming overseas. I like that they have a real person on the other end of their corporate Twitter account who actually can fix things (and has for me, on one occasion); and I like that after the kerfuffle about the pricing on the original iPhone plans they sharpened their pencils in response.

So yeah, I’m staying with Vodafone. And who knows, in the next few days at WWDC Apple might announce a third generation iPhone that does 900MHz, rendering all I’ve written above, obsolete³.

¹ In what may have been the blunder of the decade by Telecom Mobile, given the lack of handsets available and general dead-endness of the technology.

² I can neither confirm nor deny the veracity of this cartoon.

³ Of course I won’t be able to turn my phone over until at least the middle of next year – my CFO (Rebecca) probably, and quite rationally, wouldn’t agree. I try telling her I could get a more expensive hobby, like cars, but it just doesn’t work.

never mind the butter...

2009-06-07T02:54:42Z

A few weeks ago there was a little flurry of excitement here in this far-flung corner of the ex-empire at news that John Lydon was advertising CountryLife butter in the UK. Even our Federated Farmers got into the act, with a press release containing the immortal words “Never mind the butter…”.

I actually quite like the ads – they’re a bit of a laugh. But I like this response even better:

It’s true. Punks Not Dad.

rosa (vi)

2009-06-03T08:54:51Z

Rosa’s sixth birthday today. She went off to school with a princess badge emblazoned with a giant “6”, so no-one could mistake the day, and a brand new pair of pink velvet trousers run up the previous evening by Rebecca.

And tonight, we went out for dinner. Yesterday I had asked her where, if she had the choice, would she like to go for a birthday dinner. She thought for a bit, and announced: “I’d like to have my Japanese dinner!”.

Turns out what she actually means is teriyaki squid at Chow in Woodward Street – and that’s what we did. The girls ate a plate of squid each, and tipped the sauce into their noodles and ate those too. What little remained they’ve brought home for the fridge. Lunch tomorrow will be exciting.

Rebecca and I had a bowl of curry each, some satay sticks and perhaps unnecessarily, some fishcakes too. Luckily, the staff at Chow, on learning that it was Rosa’s birthday, took hers off the bill. We had great service and lots of fun from the staff there.

We had to walk slowly back to the car, though Rosa, whose infectious happiness had made one of the staff jokingly call her “drunk on squid”, ran ahead and back all the way, covering twice our distance.

And needless to say, Bella wants to go there for her birthday, too.

mystery shopper position

2009-05-28T10:00:07Z

Do people actually fall for these?

Here’s an email I got the other day, sent from a PC in Chile, but supposedly for a company called “WA-Surveys”. Supposedly WA-surveys is a company based in Washington State, but oddly, the domain is registered to a Hong Kong company.

Anyway, the email started like this:

Thank you for your interest in the Mystery Shopper position.
Our company conducts surveys and evaluates other companies in order to help them achieve their performance goals. We offer an integrated suite of business solutions that enables corporations to achieve tangible results in the marketplace.

Nice. Someone’s been reading up on their corporate bullshit manual.

It goes on to offer a “contract” for mystery shopping:

You will be paid a commission of $100 for every duty you carry out, and bonus on your transportation allowance. Your task will be to evaluate and comment on customer service in a wide variety of restaurants, retail stores, casinos, shopping malls, banks and hotels in your area.

Sounds like fun, eh? There are a few qualifications though:

Qualities of a good Mystery Shopper:
* Is 21 years of age or older
* Loves to go shopping
* Is fair and objective
* Is ON TIME
* Is very observant and able to focus on details
* Is fairly intelligent

Well, that rules out a lot of potential employees. But wait! there’s more:

* Has patience
* Is detail oriented
* Is practical
* Types well
* Is trustworthy
* Explains well in writing
* Is discreet
* Loves to learn

Could be quite a learning experience, yes.

* Handles deadlines
* Has full internet access (at home or at work)

Mystery Shopping is fun and exciting but also must be approached very seriously and is definitely not for everyone.

Hard to know how they’ll get anyone for that job. It goes on, but I think you’ve got the picture by now.

So… there’s at least two ways this thing could play out.

They send me a cheque, ask me to cash it and use the money to “mystery shop” Western Union. Cheque bounces, but not before I’ve sent the cash away.
Worse (arguably), they deposit some money in my bank account, and then ask me to use that to “mystery shop” Western Union. The money is actually stolen from some other New Zealander’s bank account.

In either of these cases there’s a good chance I’ll either lose some money, or I’ll be party to someone else losing money. It’s just a new twist on those old job scam emails.

Millton

2009-05-23T08:56:54Z

The last time we returned from the Eastern Bay of Plenty we stopped on the way. As you do.

We fetched up at Millton Vineyards, missing any signage that might have dissuaded us. It was just over two years ago, and it was, as we found out later, the middle of harvest.

Eventually someone came out to the cellar door. He apologised for the wait, saying he’d been busy (oops, we thought), and introduced himself as James Millton (double oops). We thought he’d send us away, and who could blame him.

Instead he sat us down, drawing a couple of tasting glasses of freshly pressed grape juice for the girls, and ran us through his range. That kind of personal approach works well for us. We ended up buying several bottles of special occasion stuff, the Chenin Blanc in particular standing out.

We’d long finished our purchases from that day, or so I’d thought. Recently though we’ve cleared out the spare room for Bella – part of the recent renovation work – and our last box of wine was among the final stack of relocated stuff in the living room waiting for a new home.

And in there was this bottle of Clos de Ste. Anne Millton 2005 The Crucible Syrah. Which of course we could find a new home for. Once we’d finished saying the name. We’ve been rehoming it this evening, warming and decanting it before pouring, and soon (I can’t wait!) we’ll provide a similar service for its smaller brother, the Essencia Chardonnay.

The syrah is perfectly balanced; peppery, as you’d expect, but full and smooth. My vocabulary is defeated. It was fucking good. And a nice birthday treat for me.

Recommended. And so is Millton.

back

2009-05-16T08:39:37Z

So for the last 25 days we’ve been away from home: first at Masterton, then later at Rebecca’s sister’s place in Hataitai.

All this while the bedrooms in the house were being insulated and re-lined; the floors sanded, and then, unexpectedly, the bathroom redone.

We’re home now; the place is liveable, but there’s still a lot to do.

It’s at these times one wishes for Barbara Eden to wave her fingers and just fix it all up, but that’s not how things work. Unfortunately. (Or fortunately – that whole premise was a bit dodgy…)

mantis ootheca

2009-04-25T09:17:42Z

That’s the word of the day. Ootheca.

After we got back from lunch I happened to be flicking the fallen leaves out of the car’s gutters when I saw a praying mantis down in the gutter between the back window and the boot lid.

It turned out to be a female creating (what is the right word here?) her ootheca. (It seems to be the time of the year for it – here’s a recent Wellington one, and my one of a few years back too.)

I got Rebecca, the kids and their grandparents out and we crowded around for a closer look.

She was extruding a foamy meringue-like substance that actually looked rather tasty (I’m ~~salivating~~ thinking about brandy-snaps right about now):

The whole process took about an hour, and afterwards I got her to model for a photo before releasing her to the sanctuary of a nearby walnut tree.

Meanwhile, we now have an awful responsibility. What are we going to do with the ootheca? It will eventually pop off the flexible rubber seal that it’s been laid on, and will be washed away by the action of air or water. I can’t bear the thought of all those lovely mantis babies being lost.

I guess we’ll just have to peel it away tomorrow, once it hardens, and keep it safely in a jar until hatching time. Could be interesting.

autumn in the park

2009-04-25T08:46:00Z

Just as this time last year we’ve been wandering about in Masterton’s Queen Elizabeth Park.

We started, as always, with lunch at Café Cecille. It is under new management, and was a little more focussed and sharper on their game than in some of our previous visits. They do the usual café fare, but classily done, and I’d recommend the place. Especially if you’ve worked up a bit of an appetite wandering about the park.

And it the park is just beautiful in there at the moment.

The kids walked back with their grandparents, and Rebecca and I lingered, taking photos. We nearly filled up the memory card.

One last image to hold:

Idyllic. Pity we have to return to Wellington tomorrow.

pukaha

2009-04-22T09:40:10Z

Having become tired of developing end-of-tax-year reporting at work, and coinciding with some renovation going on at home and school holidays, I’ve joined the family in the Wairarapa for a few days off.

It’d been a few years since we’d been to Mount Bruce / Pukaha. These days there’s a nice walk up through the bush to the top of the hill overlooking the centre; and we set off on this hoping that we might see (or hear) a kōkako.

OK, so we didn’t see any of those, but we did run across a few of these cheeky chappies:

The Tomtit wasn’t overly afraid of us, and actually came closer and closer, at one point landing on the track between Bella and me. Lots of fun; Rebecca and I used to encounter the South Island subspecies a lot in the beech forests around Lakes Wanaka and Hawea.

We made it to the top, and had a little rest before thundering back down the track in time for Kaka feeding at 3pm. The staff give supplementary food for whatever kaka turn up – there are apparently about 150 locally but only 20 or so turned up for afternoon tea today (although apparently this is quite a few):

After that we had a bit of look at the stitchbirds and the kiwis, but the girls were flagging somewhat and it was time to go.

Still, a really good afternoon. Continuing on the theme, I’m wondering how long the waiting list is for visits to Kapiti Island these days. The girls are nearly at a stage where they could walk to the top. And it’s been 10 years at least since the last time we were there. Could be good.

And maybe we should visit Karori again soon.

crafting

2009-04-10T09:44:26Z

Becky has had quite a bit of stuff back from Ponoko recently, something which the girls love as much as she does. Because this means there will be all sorts of interesting offcuts to be employed in projects of their own.

This morning Bella and Rosa were engaged in a bit of co-operative construction: offcuts, glue, paint – out on the deck in the sun. After dinner they showed me what they’d built:

It occurred to me that I’d seen something like this before, and I said so to the girls. A quick websearch later and, thanks to Dewalt on Flickr, proof:

Maybe I’m just being a Dad here, but does not the girls’ creation look like the Red Fort of Delhi?

And it turns out Bella’s not completely convinced either, though she’s willing to take my word for it.

a good friday

2009-04-10T08:40:35Z

In this country we get to have Good Friday off, which is very nice. Especially so as today was one of those glorious Wellington autumn days of warm and still weather. So in about the middle of the afternoon Rosa suggested we take the bikes down to the park (something we don’t do as often as we should because of the rather large number of steps involved).

Bella thought it was a good idea too; and Becky had finished what she needed to do for Craft 2.0 tomorrow… so off we went.

Of course, no sooner did we get there than the bikes were forgotten:

But really, there’s just too much to do at these sort of places:

Later, a couple turned up with a cute corgi and a croquet set. Our girls introduced themselves and had themselves a game while Becky and I kept the poor old dog company.

And really, going to the park was about the most exciting thing we did all day. And this was VERY GOOD.

Welsh Rock, lost and found

2009-03-17T08:32:29Z

I was going to rant about how disappointed I am in the latest album of my favourite band, the Super Furry Animals. But no rants – I love these guys.

I have almost everything they’ve ever done (185 tracks on my iPhone at last count) so this was a hotly anticipated release. And so I bought it from the band’s website in a feverish rush this morning, as soon as it became available.

Unfortunately, my initial impression is that of a grab-bag of mostly sub-standard tracks that I will persist with in case they somehow grow on me. I get the feeling that Gruff Rhys might be conserving his songwriting efforts for his various, and brilliant, solo stuff (under his own name, and Neon Neon) and the songs sung by the other bandmembers just don’t do it for me. Sorry.

There are two good things to take from this though:

the song that is probably the best on the album – a quirky love song for urban designers – is currently available free from their website. Recommended.
the US$8 I paid for the album went to THEM, and not to any poxy record label, so that they can go on to make a better album. Plus I don’t have another CD to try and find space (alphabetised) in the drawer for.

So, what now? What other powerhouses of Welsh rock should I be listening to instead?

I’m taken with the idea of The Peth. They’d appear to be the psychedelic stoner band that the SFA aren’t quite – they share some members, and of course have the one and only Rhys Ifans on vocals (who used to sing for the SFA in the very early days). Calling your first single “Let’s Go Fucking Mental” is a bit of a pointer to a possible direction. Or not. There’s a thoughtful review by the Guardian, and after reading that I’ve downloaded the album while writing this blog posting. Tomorrow’s walking-to-work music sorted.

And then there’s Punks Not Dad, a Cardiff punk band with the full on 1-2-3-4-GO! thing but singing of more contemporary concerns of the punk generation:

Nobody told me how it was gonna be
Working so hard to feed the family
Some days I feel like some kinda slave
Heating little jars up in the microwave
— The Filth And The Puree

I came across them this evening on Boing Boing, and it’s been the best laugh for days. Recommended.

The kids don’t understand us – they think were full of shite
But WE ARE THE DADS – and the Dads are alright!
Visiting the in-laws, drifting to the right
But WE ARE THE DADS – and the Dads are alright!
— We Are The Dads

Their album is out in May. I can’t wait.

spider du jour (iii)

2009-03-10T10:05:39Z

I needn’t let all that listening to Morrissey get me down, as I can always find a friend:

I have of course had many photos and blog postings of these ones before – they’re quite common in Wellington and, like this one, the males will often wander inside at this time of year.

It’s Trite planiceps, a species with a number of common names usually referring to the blackness of the “arms” and “head”. They’re completely harmless; rather fun, and not at all concerned by people. This one was quite “happy” to jump on to my hand and be photographed.

If only all spiders were like this.

And eventually I will come up with something else to write a blog posting about.

Will Powershop save me money?

2009-03-01T07:51:00Z

So you’ve probably seen the Powershop advertisements on TV. You may even have wondered what it was all about (indeed, some of the people I’ve spoken to thought that Powershop was a new online shopping-mall like the late and unlamented Ferrit – so it might seem the adverts aren’t communicating the Powershop proposition as well as they could).

Powershop – a wholly-owned subsidary of Meridian Energy – is trying to turn the old model of electricity retailing around. Just as the breakfast foods aisle in the in the supermarket contains lots of different cereals with different origins, attributes and prices, so Powershop offers a range of power packages from different generators, each with different characteristics. For example, some might be entirely wind-sourced; while others are carbon-offset. Some might be a fixed price for winter power to buy now but to consume later; while others might be cheap summer power available now. You set Powershop to be your power supplier, and then pay by credit card for the packages you want.

It’s a little complicated, and it’s probably not for everyone. But it sounds interesting, particularly as the prices quoted are, at the moment, much cheaper than anything you’ll get from a traditional supplier.

However, I think a little caution is advised. But before we get there, let’s work out what my current usage might be.

First of all I pulled together all our power bills for the last six years. The important data are really bills based on readings – the rest are just confusing crap. You’d think my current provider, Meridian Energy, would have a handy download of this data from their fancy new My Meridian website… but no, they just allow you to download your total bill dollar amounts, which are useless in this context. Anyway, after much sifting and sorting, I graphed the results:

And in doing all this I’ve noticed some things that are interesting, at least to me:

our winter consumption is up to double our summer consumption (no surprise there, but the amount of difference is an eye-opener);
the power companies are terrible at estimating our usage – and as a result our monthly bill can swing from $80 – $300 as the bi-monthly readings force a catchup payment;
sometimes the meter-reader enters a wrong reading – as in January 2008 when the visiting meter-reader seems to have mis-read us by -1000 units, causing at first a credit, then a colossal bill a couple months later after the next reading (exacerbated by the intervening estimate-based bill then attempting to reflect our supposed lower usage) – and I’ve had to correct my data for this;
there have been a number of substantial cost increases in power in the last few years: for example, the power we used in 2007 and 2008 cost us $3,770; yet the same power at the prices prevailing today would be $4,560! (this actually did surprise me – I had no idea prices had increased so much – I wonder if it’s the line charge);
our electricity usage varies year to year quite substantially, but on average appears to be on the increase.

All of this tells me that our household has plenty of room for improvement. And now we have enough data to make some cost comparisons with Powershop.

Right now, Powershop has a Wellington-area standard price of 18.18 cents per unit for a household metered like mine. One’s first instinct might be to multiply this price – it’s all-inclusive of line charge and GST – by the last two years’ unit consumption to get a figure ($3,590) to compare to that $4,560 above. And thus decide that Powershop is going to save us 21% on our power bills.

Not so fast. Because we are making an implicit assumption here that the Powershop prices are going to stay steady all year. Clearly they are not, as Powershop is already selling winter power now that costs more (22.49 cents per unit) than the standard price, implying that when we get into winter the standard price will be MORE than the winter powerpacks for sale now, in late summer.

And there’s the problem. We don’t yet know exactly what those winter prices are going to be.

What we could do is make a couple assumptions:

we’ll buy all our winter power now, locking in that price; and
without seeing the terms and conditions for this power pack, and for ease of calculation, let’s say “winter” means May through to August and that in all other months we’ll be able to purchase power at today’s “summer” price.

Applying these to the last two years, this would have cost $3,960, a 13% saving or $250 per year, over today’s Meridian retail prices in Wellington. But this doesn’t include factors like the cost of purchasing power up front (after all, you could have put that same money on deposit – ha! – at the bank, right?). And of course we are also making a pretty generous assumption about that summer price rate. If I was in marketing I might say “up to $250 savings”.

Even so, up to $250 per year is better than nothing. So why then, aren’t I jumping at it?

Well for one, I’m not sure if I can be bothered with the hassle of remembering to make intelligent decisions about my power purchasing right through the year. I might be able to make a more reasoned decision about this if there was a fully usable demo on the site.

And then there’s some extra risk inherent in switching to Powershop: you become more exposed to the wholesale market. What if it’s a dry year, or the Cook Strait cable breaks? The wholesale price will rise sharply, and Powershop’s prices will rise too – and possibly quite a bit faster than other power companies.

(Incidentally, there’s a great site showing in near-realtime the wholesale electricity prices here. I love it. Info-pr0n!)

I’ve worked out that if the average Powershop unit price I pay over the year rises above 23 cents per unit then I’ll start losing in comparison to staying where I am. I’ve been talking to some people who say that if this happens to them, they’ll just switch back to their present supplier. And to that I say again: not so fast. If there’s a power crisis, and the power retailers have to buy wholesale power to sell at a massive loss to their retail customer base, then they may refuse to take any new customers on board – something that I believe has happened before in dry years. You could end up stuck on the higher prices for longer.

The contra applies too. In a good year (and this year is likely to be one of those, with the hydro lakes full) it should be easy to save some money.

I’ve asked Powershop about this price volatility, and they said:

In answer to your question yes the customer is more vulnerable to the fluctuations in the wholesale market, but Powershop endeavours to smooth this volatility throughout the year. Our business modellers are very confident that over a year we will be able to deliver savings to the large majority of Kiwis.

It is our intention that what you gain on the swings (cheap prices in summer) you will not totally lose on the roundabouts (slightly more expensive in the winter). This is looking especially good this year with the great dam levels and generation capacity.

So yes, there’s risk, but Powershop say you should still save money. Fair enough.

One other thing that might sway me would be if their website allows me to easily monitor power usage. (We really need Google’s Powermeter, in other words.) There’s a hint of this in their demo video, but just a hint. I don’t know how that works or how easy it is to use.

In summary then, Powershop will save me money – up to $250 per year – but it’s not clear to me if this $250 is enough to offset the hassle of shifting; the small increase in price risk; and the unknown usability qualities of their website, both for purchasing power and monitoring our usage.

So, after all that, I’m not 100% decided on switching. You may, of course, come to a different conclusion – and I hope you do. I really like the idea of Powershop, and I hope it succeeds. I don’t think our power companies have really done us proud thus far, as today’s Sunday Star-Times would seem to confirm, and maybe – call me naïve – Powershop can be the lead for something better.

Update March 2, 2009: Commenter Jeff Weir asks if I’ve factored in the amount of the 10% prompt payment discount which may be obtained from many existing retailers if you pay on time. I thought I had, but in reviewing my calculations I see that I haven’t.

Stupid mistake! We’ve missed just one of these in four years of supply from the company, so for us it’s a discount we must include.

This makes the amount I would have paid for the last two years of electricity at today’s Meridian prices $4,107.23.

This explains why the price of power had, according to my earlier calculations, risen so much in the last two years. It hadn’t.

It also brings my calculations into line with the calculator on the Powershop website, which the other day did predict that the savings I could get would be around 3%.

And, as you’d expect, all this has the effect of making the Powershop savings much less spectacular (3.5%, or about $70 or so per year when calculated using the assumptions outlined above) compared to earlier, with of course no lessening of any of the other factors that were giving me pause.

the towel spider

2009-02-21T21:38:08Z

Late summer is when various bits of fauna start travelling about the place. Sometimes this isn’t always that welcome.

For example, yesterday morning I was not expecting the rather large thing that fell out of my post-shower towel, bounced off my shoulder and leg, and scuttled away into a dark corner. My ~~scream~~ manly shout of surprise didn’t draw any attention however as the decibel level in the lounge – kids + TV – already far exceeded mine. But after I got dressed and collected the rogue bit of fauna (from the dark corner – oh, the poetry!) in a plastic container I was rewarded with some healthy screams from the girls I showed it to. (Yes, I am twelve.)

It was a male miturgid spider. (un)Fortunately I could not take any decent photos of him – he was large (40mm with legs), fast, and very strong, and kept trying to beat his way out of the container. According to my trusty spider book, these guys are mainly nocturnal, and the males get lost inside the house looking for a mate. Clearly this one had crawled into the nearest dark place come daybreak, which just happened to be my towel.

I do have this old picture of the female of the species though. And the one really distinctive thing about these is the bright orange and shiny patches on their palps – those handy eating appendages up close to their mouths (spider knives and forks, as I perhaps erroneously explained to Rosa).

So now you know. For example, if you happen to be watching a scary film with the lights down, and a very large and fast spider comes racing across the floor towards your feet, know that he’s just looking for a dark place to hide, and under the couch looks like that place. Don’t squash him (as we used to) but catch him and send him on his way outside to continue his quest for some eight-legged lurrrvve.

the snake

2009-02-12T08:12:42Z

Down South, things are different.

Things are bigger. Much bigger. Big skies, big hills (no mountains, only big hills)… and these.

OK, so in truth earthworms this size can be found in undisturbed soils in many parts of the country. I’d found them when I was a kid, both in the garden on the farm, occasionally, and more commonly out in the tussock country.

We’d found this one while doing some unscheduled maintenance of the water supply at the crib in Hawea: this was the most exciting find during several hours of digging (and as I have remarked elsewhere, if you want to find a buried pipe, dig at right angles to its direction if you want to actually find it – ok?).

As is customary, Rosa gave it a name – the very imaginative “Wormy” – and put it in its very own bucket of soil. And it really needed a whole bucket to itself too, all 40cm of it.

Worms really aren’t that exciting, I suppose, and it was forgotten about shortly afterwards. But I made sure to put it back close to where we found it, just before we left the crib for the farm.

returnings

2009-02-08T10:06:37Z

So the holiday down south is over again for this summer. Not that I’ve mentioned it, except obliquely, up until now, here at least.

We had two weeks down there, and those following my Twitter stream will be sick of the doings by now. However, I have photos, and like Uncle Bob’s interminable slideshow of his and Verna’s European trip I will inflict them on you all.

Like this one:

This was on the trip home: we were driving through the Mackenzie Country, having left Central Otago at 5:30am to make the Picton ferry by 5:00pm (and all this not helped by a lack of sleep caused by vomitous child overnight: me with 3 decent hours and Rebecca with 2). Anyway, it was 20°C and calm, up through Twizel and Tekapo, but to our right, suspended over Burke’s Pass, was a standing waterfall of cloud tumbling off the hills.

I was in too much of a rush to get a better photo from further away, snapping this one during one of our hourly driver swapovers instead (it doesn’t really do the conditions justice).

As we got closer, the temperature dropped to 14°C, and then 12°C, with a howling wind and drizzle. The change in 10 kilometers or so from Tekapo to the pass was very dramatic. Further on, Fairlie was wet; and Geraldine was damp and cold, a cool easterly blowing in off the sea.

The weather improved the further up the Canterbury Plains we got, but there was still a coastal breeze all day which did improve the driving conditions.

And we did make it to the ferry in time.

Still recovering though.

spider du jour (ii)

2009-01-19T02:48:46Z

Today’s spider comes to us, once again, from my girls; Bella this time, who found this lovely green crab spider hiding in a hebe flower spike.

It’s some species of the Diaea genus, and they’re pretty common too, although not often seen. Apparently all you need to is lay out a white sheet under a shrub and shake it vigorously, and out of all the assorted beasties falling to the ground there should be some of these.

Or, of course: have a pair of apprentice amateur arachnologists on the case finding photogenic animals for you. That’s even easier.