Gazpacho sorbet. Watermelon and cucumber salad. Curd. Feta.

Marinated kingfish, caviar. Apple and elderflower cider.

This was the only clunker for me, the caviar was overpowering. I felt like perhaps it was past its best, though Selena liked it rather a lot – so perhaps it’s just a question of degree of seafood fandom.

The elderflower cider was delightfully light and refreshing though.

Whitebait “sandwich”. Lemon mayo, cos, watercress. Champalou Vouvray, 2009.

The whitebait was dense – no mean portions here, that’s for sure. Moist, delicious.

Spanner crab risotto. Pearl barley, shellfish foam, mustard sorbet. Sin Palabras Castrovaldes Albarino, 2010.

I found the texture of the pearl barley to be highly satisfying, and the flavour of the mustard and spanner crab was perfect.

Selena wasn’t a fan, but I still think it was exquisite.

Quail B’stila. Poached apricot, pistachio, chickpea, cinnamon, yoghurt. Willy Gisselbrecht, 2009.

Coincidence on the wine, is Sel’s fave, and we usually have a couple of bottles in the fridge at home, though it’s getting quite hard to come by.

Seared duck breast, asian greens, mandarin puree. Vincent Girardin Rouge Cuvee Saint Vincent, 2008.

The mandarin puree was perhaps a little overpowering, its extremely pure flavour brought with it a tad too much bitterness – not a problem as it was served as you can see, so I could have as much or as little as I liked with the duck.

Instead of duck, Sel opted for snapper, toasted almonds, green beans, wild prawns, cauli cream. Domaine Emilian Gillet Quintaine, 2008.

Roasted French goat cheese on fig and beetroot tart, with a red wine syrup and edible borage flower. Greenhough Pinot Noire, 2008. Gorgeous!

Poached strawberries, buttermilk panacotta, raspberry, watermelon & rosewater granita. No wine with this course.

Delicious.

Bitter chocolate mousse, spiced cherry sorbet, chocolate crumb, coconut mousse. Puig-Parahy, 2005. Extraordinary.

The Puig-Parahy is outstanding. Raisins, dates, hazelnut. Perfect match with the chocolate in that last course.

Nine courses and eight wines later and we’re done.

Thank you, French Cafe.

I’ve been live streaming our weekly show sessions, and have made a couple of live video shows (though in about the lowest tech way possible). I mentioned my idea to a couple of my friends & collaborators on the show, Ben Gracewood & Dylan Reeve. Dylan is an old friend, we’ve made short films together – and won an award for one of them – and he works in TV as an editor on the most popular show in the country. He has a bunch of talented friends in the industry, and with his hard work and sustained effort, we made something quite special.

It’s not just me that thinks it was special either, our viewers said things like “The Discourse election special is going off.”, and “Most entertaining, loosely-based election coverage is at discourse.co.nz.”, and “Loved the Discourse live election show. Can’t wait for the next election now!”

We had our share of technology problems, but considering the truck load of gear that arrived needing installation, configuration, and operation, all in the space of just a few hours, I think we did pretty well. There were some problems that could have been easily resolved with a bit more testing, but testing was extremely difficult given that all the hardware only existed in one place on the day itself. So we didn’t have our on-screen graphics, diagrams, tickers, twitter box and so on for most of the show – but it all came up in the end.

If you didn’t watch the show live on election night, it is possible to watch it on justin.tv/discourse, but the recording there is sketchy, and broken up into quite awkward chunks. Once I get my hands on a good copy, I’ll chop it up into sane chapters, and put that up in a more readily digestible format – as well as making a highlights reel. But it will take time.

Here are a few behind the scenes photos.

Dylan working on the control centre for the show, on the other side of this desk is the Mac we used to do the live hookups, Skype and so on.

This is camera 2, mounted on a big swinging jib arm, some people in the chat room didn’t like it moving around, but it was so damn cool we had a hard time listening to those people.

This is Wendy, sound recordist extraordinaire, you can see a couple of the cameras – all Sony PDW 700s, there’s one more hiding in front of her.

And here’s a big giant gallery of grabs from the stream.

(/via John Pagani)

This is relevant to them.

No big deal, just a rhino chair. Designed by Maximo Riera.

Can’t help thinking it’d go great with this other thing I want, from the same designer.

Once upon a time it was optional to add a PIN to your credit card (hell, once upon a time it wasn’t even possible to add a PIN to your credit card), now it’s mandatory, and it was that requirement that had ASB send me off on quite a satisfactory journey of verification, malware countermeasures, and delicious gooey multifactor goodness.

First up, of course, you have to log in to the bank website, which is all encrypted and verified by SSL. I don’t use a username or password I use on any other site.

This is the most basic of first steps, “something you know”, vis: username and password. So far so ordinary, but once you get into the card activation section things get slightly more interesting.

We get our first example of requiring a second authentication factor “something you have”, in this case the thing you have is the secret code printed on the back of the card. Possibly you could argue this is just a third example of “something you know”.

Next we have the bit I found most interesting, partly because I didn’t even notice they’d done it until I was about to hit enter. The numbers in the pad are scrambled, so malware that tracks your mouse clicks doesn’t net “the bad guys” anything useful.

Interesting that my brain translated this without even alerting me to anything suss, either it’s because I play too many computer games, so I’m used to little puzzles like this, or maybe everyone’s brain does the same thing?

Sure enough, after submission the “re-enter your code” box has a different number order.

Lastly, another factor: “something you have” again, this time my mobile phone – I couldn’t proceed without entering a randomly generated string of numbers they texted to me. I’m sure most people are used to this, it’s only in a combination with all of the other steps that I found this noteworthy.

Very satisfying, possibly this has been the way it’s worked for a couple of years, but of course I’m not in the habit of getting a lot of credit cards.

Have you noticed any other examples of really satisfyingly “good feeling” security?

Not perfect matches for my other guys, who are all vintage figures from 1977 and thereabouts, but they have their own charm.

What is it? Well it’s nothing serious, just a gathering point for all of my favourite pictures, unfortunately mainly lifted without attribution from wherever I found them on the web, and piled up by my magpie-like self.

I’ve got like 600 things to add (or maybe 6000, or maybe who knows), most of them very cool, some of them very dirty, subscribe and I’ll give you a prize.*

I’ll keep publishing them until I forget.

*Prize offer may not be honoured.

We were travelling out to The New Zealand Beer Festival at Ellerslie Racecourse, and figuring there was a better than even chance we’d be having a drink or two, decided we’d follow the advice on the festival website and take the train rather than driving.

We headed down to the conveniently located and smartly appointed Britomart transport station, arriving at the platform with plenty of time to spare only to find not the expected waiting train, but an empty bit of track. Speaking to the (very helpful and friendly) chap standing on the platform with a clipboard, we were told our train was leaving from a different platform nearby. And the train wouldn’t be a traditional train it would instead be a “rail bus” and it wouldn’t be leaving from a platform it’d be embarking from a “bus stop”.

In other words, we were told to go fuck ourselves. Not in so many words of course, like I said the guy was very friendly. But this is ultimately the message we were getting from Maxx, the operators of our beloved city’s rail network: “you want to take the train? fuck yourself, get on the fucking bus.”

And not only were we taking a bus, but it wasn’t leaving on anything like the same schedule of the train we were expecting to take. No, we were going to have to go and stand on the side of the road for half and hour. Our “rail bus” wouldn’t even be leaving until 15 minutes after our train should have arrived at our destination.

Shall I sit in the front seat? Shall I sit in the back seat?

Didn’t matter what seat we chose, because the bus smelled like piss from end to end, so it was a grim aspect with which we finally commenced on our journey to the beer fest.

The rail bus really does just look like any other bus doesn’t it? Well that’s what people at the various  bus stops we visited on the journey thought as well. Sure seemed surprised when they were told by the conductor that their bus transfer wouldn’t work on “a train”.

It’s not a bloody train! Of course they were confused!

It sure was a relief to see the back of our piss smelling rail bus.

Yes, of course now I know that the train had been magically transformed into a bus because they’re performing maintenance and improvements to the rail network, and they might be doing a bloody stellar job of that, but as with so many other organisations they’re not getting the communication right. After being redirected to the bus stop we discovered that the totality of signage directing rail passengers to the bus was an A4 printout taped to a pillar. The guy on the platform knew that the beer fest was on, so the higher-ups certainly should have known it, and made vastly better accommodations than they did.

Credit where it’s due for the great attendant on the platform, and whatever Maxx are failing at with communications, it’s simply inexcusable for a bus to smell like piss.

On the plus side, I’ve figured out what Maxx stands for.

M Mobile
A Auckland
X CANCELLED
X CANCELLED

What terrible misdeed must we have we done as a city to deserve these abominable operators?

As with anything that Trade Me does – thanks to the unbelievable traffic to their main site – it’s going to be a glorious success, and that appears to have been true right out of the blocks, with the launch apparently bringing so much traffic that they started to throw server errors within the first few minutes.

Still, after a few tries I got my $1 Burger Fuel burger, so it wasn’t a complete catastrophic failure, a great problem to have: “Oh no too many people are trying to give us money at once!” but not a very good look.

I have a hunch that it was actually one of their suppliers – DPS – falling over here, Treat Me must be on the same (huge) clusters that the main Trade Me site is served from, so the traffic certainly won’t be a problem, but they don’t usually take payments like this on any of their other services.

As I suggested on twitter, perhaps this means it’s time for Trade Me to provide their own payment gateway service? Something along the lines of PayPal but for local vendors would be pretty nice.

It’s certainly no Christchurch Gallery, and of course what’s on the inside is the most important thing, but the detailing in these wooden things (I don’t even know what you call them, awnings doesn’t seem quite right), is absolutely gorgeous.

… Our does the lady second from right look a bit like Stephen Fry?

Found on Symonds St.

I stole a better Android phone from the Discourse giveaway box, one of the new apps I installed is Sketchy. I decided to draw my dreams. This is from one of the most comforting.

Selena could school us all. But here’s something even she was quite excited by. She had a kahawai on the hook, when a large mako shark went for it in a sudden violent attack, leaving half a fish on the line, with its guts hanging out.

Where have we seen that before? Well let’s just have a look at the right shoulder of Willie Apiata, VC.

I reckon it’s official, New Zealand is shortly to have the most badassed Governor General to be found anywhere in the Commonwealth. And I think we can all get behind that, don’t you?

– UPDATE 2:45pm –

It was suggested on twitter that this Winged Parachute merely denotes that the wearer is parachute qualified, I believe that this badge is the “ordinary” NZ Defence Force parachute badge:

While this one is a special pattern, for NZ SAS members only:

I do not wish to pretend to have a great deal of knowledge in this area, but I believe this to be correct.

Well?

Microsoft has the best part of 90,000 employees, probably ten thousand developers, and who knows how many writers, designers, and marketing people, and no one among them could get it together to fill out this dialog with anything that explained what installing service pack 1 entails, what advantages it provides, and why this is a good or exciting thing for the user.

Can you imagine Apple ever doing the same thing?

When I see the excitement and enthusiasm that Apple has managed to instil in its users just by getting more of these little things right, Microsoft’s performance is cast in an even more appalling light.