Wednesday, 27 February 2008

My Russian Based Pizza

This is a photo of a pizza I made with some pre-mixed Pizza based mix from Russia.

It is also a test for doing Blog entries via e-mail.



Sunday, 24 February 2008

Our Garden

This is my 301st post on blogspot. It has taken me since 2005.
Anyway... here are two cool night time photos of our garden.

The Red Light Bandit

A friend is getting married soon. I thought she would like to re-live some comical past.

Katya's new gate

Katya is now too fast at crawling. So we have had to fit a gate to our deck. Trade Me supplies us again.

Saturday, 23 February 2008

New Katya Photos

Katya has been growing and developing a lot. She now consistently sleeps through the night. She has dropped back her day sleeps. She is walking while holding onto furniture.

She also likes food that we eat which includes Sweet Corn on a cob.



I hope these last two pictures are not a sign of a future habit/addiction... lol!!!


Oh... and note that a new label has been introduced. Future Katya stuff will be under Katya, not Baby.

ASB, the Banking Ombudsman and Cash Advances

I am currently in a fascinating discussion with the Banking Ombudsman about the term Cash Advance.

I have a credit card but I keep it in positive balance. My fifth form economics teacher told us about how he had got into credit card debt and used credit cards to pay off credit cards. I guess it scared me for life so I am very careful with them.
Anyway, ASB have started charging what they call a Cash Advance fee. This use to be when you took money out of an ATM and drove your balance into negative. This never affected me because I had a positive balance. We use our credit cards for getting cash out overseas because it is very convenient.
Recently they seem to have changed this and this year when we went to Siberia we got whacked with these Cash Advance fees.
I have two issues with these fees. Firstly, I am not happy paying NZ$5 on top of the already high fees for overseas transaction to withdraw my money out of an ATM. Secondly, the term Cash Advance is misleading. It certainly applies if I am using the credit provided by a credit card. But if I have a debit balance, it is not an advance. It is a withdrawal.
In the past ASB have been very customer focused. However recently they have started stinging us every which way with fees. When I rang up to query this they were not very responsive.

SO... the time has come. We are voting with our feet and moving to KiwiBank.By mid March we will have moved everything to Kiwibank. So far they are very customer focused. They have some really nice touches like giving us 30 days to get all our accounts and APs etc sorted before charging setup fees. They are paying everything to move us from our other banks. The deal they do on the mortgage is good. Their people seem very nice. I can understand why they are growing and other banks are not. I philosophically disagree with the government owning a bank but I can not argue with the service and the option it gives us.

Back to the Banking Ombudsman. So far the word useless is an apt description of this office. I have Bachelors and Masters degrees. Yet even I could not make head nor tail of one paragraph they wrote to me.

While there is a prima facie case for such a role, it seems that there is little point in our tax payer dollars being wasted on such a position. It would be better to make the same amount of funding available for lawyers to bid for so they could take class actions against organisations when they breach consumer law. Such an approach is litigious but is better than the alternative which seems to be sector capture (when the Ombudsman does the bidding of the sector they are suppose to be policing).

So my recommendations...

1. Avoid ASB like the plague. My prediction is that they will be regarded as being like Westpac in less than 5 years time. A good business bank but does over the individual.
2. If you have issues with your bank, go to Kiwibank.
3. if you are in the National Party and want some quick runs on the board when Labour gets the boot, look first at the Banking Ombudsman. You won't lose anything by giving this black hole of tax payer money the flick.

Finally, this hassle with ASB has reminded me of just how much of a difference good customer care makes. Many years ago I signed up for a Vodafone plan. It was perfect for me. Eventually they phased out that plan. Then they forced me onto a plan that was not as good for me. I wrote to them and they recognised the change was a step back and gave me $200 credit. I was very happy with that. Five years later I am still a very happy Vodafone customer and I have finally been able to give Telecom the flick because Vodafone launched a plan that was perfect for me. I am sure that they have well and truly made back that $200. AON Insurance is another organisation who has seen me right and given very good customer service. I have been a customer with AON (and their predecessors) for over 15 years.

Sunday, 17 February 2008

Saturday, 16 February 2008

Genesis Energy

The power companies have been in the news recently because they have not been keeping up with the investment required to supply electricity. In the next few days I suspect Genesis will be in the news. The reason is their billing system.

Today we got a bill for 1230 days of fixed charges for the month of January. This is quite interesting since I am pretty sure January only has 31 days. Even allowing for a small variance in billing cycles I am pretty confident that this is incorrect.

What has likely happened is that their billing system has been recently modified and the modification has not been tested enough.

If we are not an isolated example, Genesis is going to be flooded with phone calls on Monday and undoubtedly will make the news when some person freaks out at such a large bill.

I guess it is time for a bit more investment in the billing systems as well.

The new Apple is coming...


I have splashed out on a new computer. My old PowerBook 12inch 1.5Ghz G4 is really struggling with all the new video content that is now around. Even running Safari causes the temperatures to rise in it - GPU gets stressed.
I think I got the best deal by getting a re-conditioned MacBook from Apple US. With a 3 year warrantee it comes to about NZ$2000 including GST and a RAM upgrade to 2Gb (got a real steal on the RAM through a NZ company called www.toshcomputers.com).
A friend is bringing the computer into NZ in about a week's time. It is pretty exciting stuff :)

Oh... if anyone wants to buy a well looked after PowerBook 12inch 1.5Ghz 768Mb RAM 80Gb 7200RPM HD CDRW/DVD laptop... let me know. I will probably put it on Trademe. It is still a very good computer and wonderful for traveling with as it is so lite and small. It also has all the features (modem, wireless, bluetooth)... just not enough grunt for video.

Be a man...



I have posted a number of videos by Mark Driscoll on my blog. If you follow them through into Youtube you will notice there are a number of videos that seem to be part of a campaign against him. There seems to be some conflict in the Mars Hill Church family. As in all cases, it is important to be discerning about what people preach. Whether they are a big name pastor like Mark or an anonymous party like some of the critique videos.

Some of the accusations in these critique videos are reasonably serious. If they are true, then we will see some serious trouble in this church in the near future. So... be wise. That said, I enjoyed these two videos.

Bible Toilet Humor

Monday, 4 February 2008

The Puritans by Jack Cavanaugh


During our time in Russia I raided the library at the apartment we stayed in. I came across a book called The Puritans. It looked from the cover like a soppy Mills and Boon novel but it was not.
It is a novel but set within a lot of historically correct events.
It is essentially the story of a young mans life. I am not going to say any more because it will ruin the story.
I will say that it was one of the most riveting reads I have EVER come across. As parents will know there are times you have to stop doing things you want to do to look after your child. When this happened while I was reading this book, it was a real struggle to put it down.
The ending is tragic and beautiful at the same time. What more can someone want in a book.
So five thumbs up from me! Fully recommended. Should be made into a movie!!!