Toady has been a productive day although the temperature was cold and there are forecasts of the temperature will be pretty cold for the next week or two. I’ve got my heater on at the moment and set it to 20°C so that it keeps my place at a constant temperature during the day. I was expecting a whole lot of work after coming back from my weekend but apart from email everything else was ok which made the day go pretty quickly. The current tough economic climate is impacting all businesses including the one I’m working at but luckily in the Asia-Pacific region we went through the efficiency drive so we’re not going to need to do anything extra. I really do hope that the local New Zealand economy picks up soon because there are plenty of New Zealanders doing it tough at the moment.
I’ve finally installed Chrome 154 and things are going well so far (my work laptop is on Chrome 152 but I think that is because after the fiasco with Chrome 153 it is understandable that they want to extensively test it before allowing the update to go ahead). The one thing I have noticed with Chrome when compared to Safari is how aggressively Safari puts to sleep inactive tabs asleep which can cause problems if you click on a tab only to find that you have to refresh it to get the website visible (when I click on tab after being inactive the page will be white) where as at least in the case of Chrome there is the ability to disable that. The reality is that I’ve got 24GB of memory so it isn’t as though I’m running it on a system with limited specifications which is why I really don’t need those extra memory optimisations that Safari is employing.
There is some good news recently – 2 Degrees turned a profit after spending the last few years consolidating all their acquired brands into a single brand. I’d say that as they move customers over to the new brand you’ll eventually see the old brands disappear off the internet in much the same way that One NZ is doing the same thing by moving their customers gradually over to their new modernised billing system that brings all their services to a single billing platform. The other good news the National Ticketing Solution has rolled out in Canterbury – it has been a long time coming but it is a ‘world first’ to have a national ticketing solution which will mean if you live in Auckland but travel somewhere else in New Zealand you can use the same NFC card. The timetable for it coming to Wellington is 2027 but one thing to keep in mind it is a gradual roll out and that schedule is very much dependent on whether there are any unforeseen hiccups that appear.
There is also more good news in terms of bringing rail back to Christchurch (link) which will really help with the huge amount of growth that the region has been experiencing – could Christchurch eventually become an Auckland sized city? it would make a lot of sense for that to happen particularly when you consider that most of New Zealand’s energy generation is in the South Island so it makes sense that is where most of the development should be taking place particularly when it comes to manufacturing. It appears that things are gradually happening, slowly but surely, so maybe in a few years time we move beyond building a business case and start seeing new rail lines, electrification and rolling stock being ordered.
Take your time and eat slowly – enjoy the meal and the added bonus is that it gives your stomach time to feel full rather than eating in a hurry and still feeling hungry afterwards. Ensure that you’re getting enough protein and fibre – fibre slows down the release of energy from your food so then you don’t have a massive sugar spike followed by a crash and protein allows you to keep feeling fuller for longer.
