NZ Post: Please Check Your Front Steps

The bench, as seen on Google...

Recently in Wellington, I sat on a bench beside NZ Post House, a corporate structure on Waterloo Quay.
Just a simple concrete bench, somewhere to park the bum for ten minutes. The good thing: within two metres were two 'No Smoking' signs, which meant I'd have clean air to relax in. But within two minutes, the best-laid plans of mice and men began to unwravel, to wit:
3.30pm - sat down.
3.32pm - a couple stood behind me and lit cigarettes. When the no-smoking area was pointed out to them, they moved begrudgingly away into the nearby carpark.
3.35pm - a woman lit up beside me. When I showed her the sign, she apologised and walked off.
3.39pm - a man leant on the wall behind me and lit up. When asked to move, he got rather snotty, took two paces out onto the footpath and sniped: "Is this good enough?"
3.43pm - another smoking couple arrived: their response to my enquiries was another grumpy departure.
3.45pm - Hmmm, thought I, if I'm feeling such little love, then who - if anyone - enforces these no-smoking areas? Was the answer above? Up the lift to NZ Post's office...but the receptionist could not enlighten me at all. She seemed lacking in any knowledge of who actually owned the building and thus who was administratively in charge. She did know that a no-smoking zone existed: "The zone's been there for quite a while, but we only removed the butt bin a few months ago." I must be a little slow. What's the point of a no-smoking zone, if it has a bin for cigarette butts?

Please Engage Brain When Using SmartPhone

In America – the land of opportunity – the best way to fend off the embarrassment caused by your own stupidity is to find someone to drag through court.
In the case of Lauren Rosenberg, struck by a car after walking into a busy flow of traffic in Utah, she's dumping the blame for her 'lack of situational awareness' squarely on the shoulders of Google Maps!
According to her, Google Maps told her to walk along busy State Route 224 to reach her destination. But she says the map didn't warn her it was a high-speed road with no pedestrian paths. It obviously didn't tell her to open her eyes either...duuhh!
Rosenberg, trying to weasel US$118,000 from Google to cover medical bills and loss of income, says the warning on the PC version of Google Maps (as you can see in the picture, in yellow highlight) is not on the portable version she was seeing on her ironically-named BlackBerry smartphone...

And to cover all her money-grubbing options, she's also suing the motorist who struck her, for "severe permanent physical, emotional, and mental injuries"... though her mental state may well have existed prior this incident!
Do all instructions need to add: "Please use brain when following these directions"?

"Quit Facebook" Day

Facebook members unite! And quit!
Following issues over users' privacy, a global Facebook exit is being urged for Monday May 31 2010. And momentum seems to be building: just last week, the phrase "how to quit Facebook" generated nearly 17 million Google results and "how do I delete my Facebook account?" close to 16 million...in a one-day period! Granted, the 33 million search results do not mean all of those users will actually delete their Facebook accounts, but it indicates a lot of pissed-off people!
One of the major problems users had was new privacy settings: lengthy, confusing and many members made private information public unknowingly. Then there was the constant stream of notifications and puerile quiz results. Plus there have been tragic cases where women have gone to meet men they'd met on Facebook, only to be murdered.
There're many articles to help users delete their Facebook accounts. Of course, they need to know that, although deleting their account means they’ll never see that data again, Facebook can - and will continue to use it for data mining.
If you're going to quit Facebook, remember it takes two weeks to be fully deleted (note that 'delete' is different to 'deactivate'). If you log-in to your account within these 2 weeks (just to check you're actually deleted), the request to delete your account will be voided and you'll still be in the loop.
PS: 27 May 2010 - Facebook suddenly announces easier privacy settings! Sounds desperate to me!
PS: 30 May 2010 - ...and reviewers are saying: "Is that the best you've got for us?"

Will They Ever Learn?

In 2001 while on a Paris-USA flight, Richard Reid tried his shoe-bomb trick – remember that? It took US President George W. Bush six days to comment.
In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. President Bush took three days to respond. (And during that fiasco, eye-witness reports of major flooding weren't offically "confirmed" for 11 hours... hmmm, just like the NZ Civil Defence response to the Samoan tsunami reports in September 2009.)
September 2009: Typhoon Ondoy caused the worst floods in Manila's history. Again, very slow response - but agencies justified it by saying at least they were faster than the US/Katrina response!
On Christmas Day this year, while flying into America from Amsterdam, Abdul Abdulmutallab attempted to explode a bomb inside his underwear (there's a joke in there somewhere!). It took US President Barak Obama three days to reassure his people.
The commonality through all these instances is information. In terms of reassurance, Joe Public can NOT wait days to know what "the system" is doing to safeguard them. And when disaster is looming or rescue efforts are required, NO waiting time is acceptable – people need information NOW, not days later. That information must be fast, accurate, regularly updated and supported by rapid response. One can only hope that, in 2010, when the next situation occurs, things may be different. But wait: information is coming in (late!)... that pigs WILL fly next year too!

Communication Is The Key

Public Relations:101 - inform people!
During this week's Civil Defence response to the Samoa tsunami, this most basic lesson was forgotten. The poor information flow seemed to begin in Hawaii, where the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre said (contrary to its name!) that it did not issue tsunami warnings – that was up to individual countries. All it did was state whether a tsunami was building, but it couldn't do that until a few markers had been hit so it could analyse data (sadly, one of those hit 'markers' was Samoa).

If that is so, then blame must lie with NZ Civil Defence HQ, which appears to have not contacted major news networks with warnings – even though there're dedicated 'hotlines' for this. Information that did filter through (to some locations and not to others) seemed contradictory and confused: for example, Wellington Airport, sitting just 13m.above sea level was not notified at all!
On breakfast tv, the CD spokesman dodged questions, labelled eyewitness accounts of death and injury "rumours" and said he'd provide "some details in an hour"...about the time a tsunami was expected to strike!
When Civil Defence situations arise, fast accurate and regular information flow is needed. This week, we did not get it. Again. How many times will CD fluff a "near-miss", before The Real Thing catches it out?

Power Up, Scotty!

The good ol' New Zealand winter draws closer, and in Auckland there's always high humidity. So instead of tolerating condensation inside the abode again this winter, I thought I'd be pro-active and take action.
Inspired, I headed to the nearest hardware store and bought two timers - one for my dehumidifier and the other for my heater. Thought I'd switch the former on automatically late afternoon to dry out the air, and then the latter after that (as dry air heats faster).
Ok, plug timers into junction box, switch on individual junction box plugs, plug appliances into timer switches - remembering to switch on actual appliances at source - and set timers with appropriate on/off times. Did I cover all the steps? Yes. Did they work? Er...guess...no!
So I spent an hour (yeup, count it: one...) sitting on the floor by the junction box checking, setting, waiting, watching, checking, resetting, waiting, watching, resetting again. Eventually I concluded that one timer switched on but did not switch off, and the other didn't switch on at all.
So back to get the products swapped: not as easy a task as it could have been, given that the reluctant assistant kept insisting they had "never had any problems with this brand before". *Ding-dong!* Warning bells rang dimly somewhere down the dark dank dingy corridors of my cranium.
Home, bearing two new timers. I proceeded to proceed through the plug-in procedure...wait, watch... same problem, no action. Fiddle-curse-mutter. *Ping!*
A light went on. Contrary to the instructions, the switch on the side of each unit (which determines timed power or normal power flow), instead of being pushed towards the 'timer' icon for timed power, needed to be pushed toward the 'normal' icon - thus covering 'normal' and only leaving 'timer' visible...therefore showing that 'timer' was in fact what was selected!!! Duuuhhh!!
Of course, it would have been of some help if the "Made-In-China" units' instructions had made that clear. Or maybe it's just me...

Broadband Botch-up...

Technophobe...dat's me.
For example, broadband. When you get it installed at home, a techo simply fronts up and installs it, doesn't he? But no, I was gonna do it myself: after all, how hard could it be?
So I signed up with NZ Telecom, and was sent a lil' blue box covered by what resembled children's doodles, proclaiming the contents to be Telecom's Broadband Single PC Self-Install Kit. Cool! (Actually not so cool...Telecom's marketing dept needs to know that not everyone thinks that sort of artwork looks good - it reminded me of mindless schoolboy scribblings.)
What Telecom didn't tell me was that, as revealed on the back of said lil' blue box, my computer would need Windows 2000, XP or Vista in order to run this Broadband thingee. Problem: I have a dinosaur of a HP PC which has Windows 95 as its operating system. It's such an ancient beast that its set-up material is all on floppy discs, its hard-drive doesn't have a CD, and the back protrudes so far out that it makes the Hunchback of Notre Dame look positively svelte!