samadhisoft.com

At the moment, I’m listening to an Internet radio station I really like and I’ve decide to put up a permanent page here on the blog for such things. The new permanent page will be called Internet Radio ➡. As of now, it’ll contain a short list – just one entry – but I’ll add more over time.

I use WinAmp to listen to Radiostations here. WinAmp can pull down ShoutCast broadcasts and the ShoutCast technology has opened the world up so that anyone anywhere with a good Internet connections can be a Disc Jockey to the world, if they want.

The first station I’m going to put up here is at http://207.44.154.48:8000 (see the Internet Radio Page) and you’ll probably need WinAmp to give it a listen. This station is based out of Auckland, New Zealand and they bill themselves as Soul FM New Zealand – Mixed Easy World Latin African Asian Celtic Native New Age Meditation.

Enjoy. I’ve eight more days here before I fly back to the States. I’m going to try to put together a longer post before I go and summarize what’s happened to me here these two and a half months in New Zealand and all of my feelings about the place and the people I’ve met. It’s been a beautiful experience.

Sometimes you just get lucky if you shoot enough photos.

The one below was shot using a web camera.  The cam was in Washington State in the US and I was controlling it from here in Christchurch, New Zealand.    In the US, it was late on a windy, cold and snowy evening and my wife was telling me that some 250,000 people are without power there in Snohomish County.  While she was talking, she was looking at a view out the window here in New Zealand of the park across the street and sunlight on the trees.

She was hunkered down in the house waiting for the weather to blow over and wishing she was here.  To me, the photo captures the moment so well.   Click on the photo to expand it.  Enjoy.

Tom and Marie, who were at the expatriates party back on December 10th, sent me some photos they’d taken at the event which we haven’t seen before. I’ve put them up on the page where I originally reported on the party here: ➡

Enjoy!

These were on the Christchurch City Council’s web site and they are spectacular !!! Enjoy.

Image 1: ➡

Image 2: ➡

Image 3: ➡

Image 4: ➡

Now, my wife and I have had a number of discussions over the years as to what constitutes a mountain and what constitutes a hill and perhaps we’ve even quibbled over the size of small piles of dirt in this respect.

Part of this has been because she hails from Kansas (please, no comments about evolution – she assures me she has faith in the idea). And, when we’ve been there visiting her family, she’s often pointed out to me the Flint Hills as being the ‘high country’ in the area.

Well, I always look to see what she’s talking about and then I laugh and I say something scathing like, “You call that a hill?” And I might follow this up by suggesting that because she’s a good deal shorter than I am, perhaps she’s suffering from an optical illusion. But, my laughter and jibes aside, she always assures me in all seriousness that those are indeed the big Flint Hills.

So, you can imagine my surprise when a friend of ours came up with mountaineering articles describing actual expeditions to the highest peaks in both Kansas and Nebraska!!!

So, with great embarrassment, I am here publicly apologizing to my wife for my earlier snide comments about the highlands of Kansas and I am publishing a link to these mountaineering articles here for all to see ➡

Once the magazine cover appears, you can click on the article titles to read the stories of the expeditions.

– research thx to phk.

A while back, I said I’d post some photos of our new apartment here and here they are.

Some of you will be able to click on these pictures and see a larger version of them.

For those of you who haven’t been following along, this apartment is on the 6th floor of a high-rise that overlooks an 800 acre park, Hagley Park, on the west side of the Christchurch city center.   It is really a beautiful location as you can see from the shot off the balcony.  here’s a shot of the building looking back from the park:

A gray and overcast day in Christchurch, New Zealand but it isn’t dampening my spirits at all. Today is shaping up to be an interesting and fun day.

Moving day

Today is moving day for me. If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that when my wife, Sharon, and I came here back in August, we bought an apartment in Christchurch. Well, today is the day that the deal is completed. In the US, we’d say “Closing is today.” Here in New Zealand, they say, “Today is Settlement Day.” Either way, the papers we signed back in August come to fruition today and, hopefully by noon, money and papers will have changed hands between the bank and the solicitors (that’s what Lawyers are called here in NZ) and it will all be a done deal and I will be handed the keys.

I’ve been leasing an apartment on the ground floor of the same building where the unit we’ve bought is. Our new unit is on the 6th level. In the US, we’d call it the sixth floor because we number floors so the ground floor is one. But here in New Zealand, they seem to prefer to call the ground floor zero. So in NZ terms, our apartment number is B5-2 for Building B, Floor 5, Apartment 2. It has a slightly different floor plan and I will be taking some photos once I get up there and post them here. Here’s one of the building, itself.

Moving should be easy. I’ve got the things I carried here and suitcases and a few additional things I’ve bought since arriving a month ago. I’ve gotten a desk, an office chair and a printer, for example. I think I’m going to become good friends with the building’s elevator, today. Both the apartment I was leasing and the one we’ve purchased came fully furnished.

Technical Fun

Back on December 2nd, I installed new Stats software here on this Blog. Stats are how you can follow how many people are reading your blog, where they are coming from and when they’ve visited. You can even see which pages they’ve been looking at and for how long. The software I’m using is called BBClone and it is from Germany. Many thanks to Kevin at cryptogon for helping get it installed.

It’s interesting and a bit of an ego addiction to look and see how many people have been reading along and where they are.

This morning, for example, I noted there was a burst of 18 readers in a single hour. I went and looked in the detailed stats and I could see that someone in Estonia on an XBox had apparently ‘discovered’ the site and passed it on to a number of other readers – at least, I think that’s what happened.

If you are curious what my stats look like, you can see them here: ➡ Note, they are divided into Global, Detailed and Time categories.

There is another way to see traffic on this web site and that is via a piece of software called ClusterMaps. With this product, you can see a map of the world and it will show you where the readers are coming from and in approximately what volumes. You can see this here: ➡ Once you have the world map on your screen, you can click on any continent to see it expanded for more detail. Note also, that you can request that the cluster sizes be made smaller for better detail/resolution.

Both of these facilities are also available for you to look at along the right margin of this web site towards the bottom. Look for ‘Stats’ and the world map image.

More Technical Fun

Yesterday, I had several windows open on my screen here. In one window was a real-time web cam image of the room at home (near Seattle, Washington in the USA) where our computers are. In another window was an exact image of what was on my wife’s computer’s screen at that moment in that room at home.

I watched my wife walk into the room, spend a moment petting Kali, our cat, and then she sat down at her computer and opened an E-mail I’d written to her a few minutes earlier. After she read it, she replied to it.

As she wrote her reply, I watched her typing at her computer via the web cam as Kali walked back and forth over the keyboard ‘helping her’ and I could see an exact copy of her screen her as well and I saw the words there as she typed them.

As this was going on, I had an image in another window here of the screen of my computer at home, which was just across the room from her, where I was doing some accounting work. And,I was listening to music via the Internet on KUOW FM which is a radio station in Seattle and I was also pinging half a dozen server systems here and there to make sure they were all up and running and available to me if I needed their services.

I’ve been working with computers continuously since 1977 and I am still amazed year after year at what they can do. If my wife has a problem on her computer at home, I simply link to her screen from here in New Zealand, and as I fix the problem, she can see me zooming the mouse cursor around on her screen and typing – just as if I was sitting there with her.

If I forgot some files at home, I simply attach to my system there and transfer them here.

When I want to do accounting for our business there, Sharon just scans the documents I need into her computer and they are then available to me here to read on the screen or print so I have hardcopies.

Currently, we have the web cam setup in the hallway. Here a shot from just a few minutes ago of two of our cats just hanging out:

I am careful with my bandwidth usage. The Internet is not an infinite resource. When I listen to music via the Internet, I always choose low bandwidth feeds. When I’ve got a web cam running, I only update the image at intervals rather than continuously. And, the software that lets you see and control other computer screens remotely (radmin) is quite gentle on bandwidth. So, don’t be thinking that all this hi-tech fun is wasting huge bandwidth. It ain’t so.