September 2009

Don't use the Aerocity shuttle online booking system from gomadrid.com – it would send your credit card data completely unencrypted over the internet. This is despite the form itself being hosted on an encrypted page, and a prominent, false statement about how your details are encrypted and “100% secure” – they're absolutely not, view source on the form and you can see that even though the page with the form is hosted on that secure server, it submits the form contents back to the insecure site at http://www.gomadrid.com/cgi-bin/aeromail.cgi. Since you need to give them your credit card details to book, that means your credit card details would be at risk. If you're using a good browser like Safari, it will by default warn you before doing this, but not all browsers would.

Before I hop on a plane overseas I thought it'd be nice to post these three panoramas of NZ that I took in the last year and stitched together using AutoPano Pro.

This is probably the best explanation so far of exactly how ‘quantitative easing’ works:

So the [UK] government has responded in traditional style by throwing more money at the problem, more quantitative easing. As St George, our [the UK's] patron saint used to say, the best way to kill a baby-eating dragon is to continue feeding babies to it until it's too fat to breathe. Because in the long run, you'll make a net saving on babies.

Two interesting links about dating. First @gnat blogged a link to the OkCupid OkTrends post about what not to say when you send contact someone on a dating site: “ur”, “u”, “r”, “ya”, “cant”, and “hit”, “sexy”, “beautiful”, “hot”, and “cutie”. “band”, “vegetarian”, and “zombie” are all good though :). Second there's an amusing article in the home-of-quality-journalism Daily Mail in the UK about the ego epidemic in which we are given the disturbing news that women are now (hushed voice) as egotistical and narcissistic as men:

Wingsuits are automatically pretty crazy/awesome, but when you start flying them along the sides of cliffs and next to mountain road hairpins, it's pretty hardcore:

Some photos from a walk from Evans Bay along to Shelly Bay, Wellington. Spring sun has arrived :).

I think the Emo Lincoln is the best of a good set, though the 70's black Washington is a close second. (Thanks Jess)

Things have gotten a lot simpler since the write-up I gave for Leopard.

Again, Snow Leopard comes with Ruby preinstalled, and I strongly recommend that you stick with that version rather than using the macports Ruby – no need to have two versions on your system.