"Unavailable After" Google Meta Tag

This one's handy for those time-specific marketing pages. So for instance, if you add this tag to a page:

< META NAME="GOOGLEBOT" CONTENT="unavailable_after: 31-Dec-2013 23:59:59 EST" >

Then the page in question will vanish from the Google cache on the 1st Jan 2014 EST. You'll no longer appear in the results. Could be fairly neat for some time-critical promotions that you'd like to have appear in search results but want to save yourself the hassle of switching the current page to a version with NOINDEX tags shortly after the thing ends.

This also helps get the job done, since you never can be quite sure when the crawler will come back to your page and see the NOINDEX tags, so this is nice since you can just set it and forget and make no changes to the page when the promotion ends. Nifty.

Oppose the Auckland City Council Draft Liquor Licensing Policy

I've joined a Facebook group with the same title as this blog post. If you use Facebook and find this useful, please join it here also: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=285103490054. If you are keen to make a submission on this, the URL with the form to make an online submission is at: http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/auckland/introduction/safer/accords/current.asp

The Auckland City Council has released its Draft Liquor Licensing Policy.

THIS POLICY COULD SERIOUSLY AFFECT YOUR BUSINESS, CAREER AND YOUR RIGHTS TO CONSUME ALCOHOL!!!

The Policy proposes dividing Auckland City into three sectors with different licensing hours for each. These are for all On-Licences; restaurant, bar and entertainment.

• Auckland CBD:

Hours 7am till 1am
Can be extended to 3am if
- premise has a clean record
- ‘trained’ security staff on from 11pm – 4am; 1 per 50 patrons
- all staff after 1am are NZQA qualified responsible servers

Can be extended to 24 hours if in addition to the above
- CCTV cameras are in place
- 'one-way door' from 4am
- free food from 3am
- no one person purchases over 4 drinks at a time from 3am

• Entertainment Precincts:

These are Ponsonby Rd, Parnell Road, Newmarket, Mt Eden Village, Kingsland Village and Mission Bay ONLY.
Hours 7am to 1am
Can be extended to 3am if
- the premise has a clean record
- ‘trained’ security staff on from 11pm – 4am; 1 per 50 patrons
- all staff after 1am are NZQA qualified responsible server
- 'one-way door' from 2am

• Everywhere else:

Hours 7am to 11pm
Can be extended to 12pm if
- the premise has a clean record
- ‘trained’ security staff on from 10pm – 1am; 1 per 50 patrons
- all staff after 11pm are NZQA qualified responsible server

All Off Licenses including supermarkets will have a 10pm closing time.

We urge you to make a submission on the policy.

The submission form is attached or you can submit on line at

http://www.aucklandcity.govt.nz/council/documents/liquor/say.asp#on

these must be into the Council by 7 October.

Some issues to think about and consider including in your submission include:

How this will financially impact on your business; will the business value be negatively impacted ?

How this will affect your staff with regards to a loss of jobs if you have a drop in hours?

Why are we doing this now with the Super City about to form and the Law Commission about to report back on reform of the Sale of Liquor Act?

What is the problem they are trying to solve with this Policy and will these measures solve it?

How will this affect the Rugby World Cup?

The Public enjoy access to neighbourhood bars and restaurants without having to travel to the city for a night out?

How have the entertainment precincts been determined? Why are they so limited? What about other areas such as the top of Symonds St/Khyber Pass area, Grey Lynn, Pt Chevalier, Onehunga, Otahuhu, Panmure/Mt Wellington, St Heliers etc to name a few?

70% of alcohol consumed is off licensed premises. Evidence shows that 82 % of alcohol related offending is related to off licence consumption (Police National Alcohol Assessment April 2009).

Driving drinkers out of the suburban bars at 11pm will either compel them to drink in unsupervised areas creating more alcohol related harm or to travel into the CBD which creates issues around migratory drinking and drink driving.

The Sale of Liquor Act is already in place to promote safe alcohol consumption, dictate the host responsibilities of Licensees, and provide heavy penalties to those who do not comply.

There is no mention of hours for outdoor areas. The Auckland City Council Street Trading Policy refers to this policy for hours.

How a 'one-way door' at 2am in Entertainment Precincts or 4am in the CBD would affect your business?

The cost of training all staff to NZQA qualified server standard, especially given the transient nature of our staff.

Door security requirements will be great for security contracting firms but cost prohibitive for venues.

How much it would cost you to provide 'free food' if you are open after 3am. What does 'free food' mean?

Again we urge you to make a submission and to tick the first box that indicates you would like to appear before the Council Committee. It is imperative that we have as many people as possible representing the industry appear to speak with the Council if we are to change this proposal.

If you have any questions, would like a model submission to work from, or help with writing a submission, please call Sara Tucker at HANZ on 0800 500 503.

Alcohol is a factor in less than a third of road accidents, and casualties have declined from 328 in 1986 to 128 in 2007

(All information listed here is from the Hospitality Association of New Zealand HANZ)

I'm happy - Orcon is fast. re: ADSL2+ in 2009

Real world best was: 2.3MB/s sustained, and 2.4MB/s peak.

Line rate is 21704 kbps (down) / 1224 kbps (up)

Checkout this screenshot below - I'm downloading about a CD's worth of data in 5 minutes over my ADSL2+ Orcon connection. This is a great improvement over my previous provider Slingshot, who were great in that they had the cheapest and best reporting features in their accounts (like having 4 PIN numbers to track all your flatmates toll calls on easily)... but the connection speed was very poor! Whoopsee! Fine until one day when the connection developed this weird inexplicable transparent proxy condition and we had to switch.

Nice download speed

And here is an Adobe Download via Akamai, done at 8:28pm on a Thursday night - pretty much peak time probably, still was bursting to over 1MB/s:

I have a theory that the homehub - a Siemens router - interacts nicely with the wire in NZ and gives a small boost. What is odd is that I'm pretty sure I had ADSL2 in my street with Slingshot since I was running an ADSL2 Dynalink router but I guess it was just running G.dmt instead.

Slingshot Speedtest

Orcon Speedtest

Peak speed: 2.31 MB/sec

Mac versus PC Comparison

This is a list that I am maintaining as I transition to using a Mac at home after using PCs since 1998 (and Mac + Amiga before that). I hope one day Steve Jobs or someone with power at Apple will take notice and implement some of my requested changes: Mainly, to allow much more powerful use of the drop down menus by automatically annotating every applications quick keys automatically, and providing a control panel to disable and control this allocation; and secondly, to fix up some of the system dialogue boxes that you can't seem to tab between sometimes.

The World's Ugliest Cars...

I'm now accepting submissions of ugly car pics from the public.

This next one is from Antony Freeman, its not really ugly but more crazy and special:

Crazy Car

Here it is boys and girls, Mr Ugly Car as seen in NZ:

Ugly Car

3 Wheeled Ugly Car

Kinda cool, but ultimately, kinda ugly car. UPDATE: This is a Ford Taunus. Ugly name too! 🙂

Strange bloated white ugly car of unknown origin

Actually this car is pretty darn cool 🙂

Just plain wrong

Is that a porsche? This is odd... and ugly

Super trippy and ugly van!

WTF? Another strange bulbous looking thing. What up with that?

We call him

This reminds me of those chewing gum cards... what were they called?

Well that's it folks. Some cool pics of some real strange & ugly cars from around the world.

Grab yer-self a Spaceships Campervan next time you're in New Zealand:

Breaks Co-op UK Tour 2006 Tour Dates

I played drums for Breaks on a 60 date tour of the UK and the Republic of Ireland!

Tomachi on the big screen at Hyde Park in London. That was supporting Roger Waters from The Who

In other news: Elton John loves breaks how he was "vibing" on the album according to this Lefsetz page.