Welcome to Krytons Garage. Here you will find things about me and a little insight into what goes on in my mind. I'll try and put what I can here but there is always something rolling around in there and some times I don't get to put it down in words.

If you think that I have something incorrect here or you would like to contact me please follow the link on the left.

Kids these days spend all their time playing games online, rather than outdoors. Given the range of choices, who can blame them? We spend so much time playing to the tune of political correctness that we forget just how we all got to the point of where we are in life. We forget how much the lessons that we learned in the playground affect what we do today. Bull Rush has been getting a lot of attention these days because it is too rough for some. I remember playing Bull Rush as a child at school during lunch time with lots of kids. Sure, I received a few injuries during my time playing, but I never thought that it should be banned.

I remember seeing a story a long time ago about banning the lolly scramble because it’s not fair on those who miss out. To be honest, when I was involved in lolly scrambles I never felt like I was missing out. Growing up for me was not very difficult. I lived in a good neighbourhood and my parents struggled just like everyone else. So when I didn’t get anything from a lolly scramble I just got on with things.

I have two children. They are, right now, the centre of my universe. They play computer games both on a home computer and also on a Sony PlayStation 3 connected to a modern TV that has access to a couple of online content-streaming providers, NetFlix and LightBox. They also have bikes and more toys that I can list here. They have a good collection of Lego that they don’t play with as much as I would like, but then again it’s a different world for them. Lego for me is one of the things that I can attribute to my engineering work that I do today. It gave me the skills for creative thinking, and for diagnosing problems which I use these days.

Both of my children have tablets that are connected to the Internet through our home wireless and they use them to play games at home and offline while in the car on travels. But we still play Eye Spy while on the road. My oldest son seems to have taken on some of my computer passion and has reminded me that with a bit of trial and error and determination you can still piece together a workable machine that will play most games you want. But that's not to say that he is on it all the time.

Just this weekend past I had to say to my kids that we couldn’t go to Avalon Park in Lower Hutt with their bikes because we didn’t have the petrol to drive all the way from Johnsonville to Lower Hutt. Avalon Park has a great little setup for riding around on. It’s a road area that is sealed and painted and even has a train track that runs most Sundays running through it. This was the first time that I had to say this to them; normally we would have been able to take them.

The point I’m trying to make is that your children will take their cues from you. I still spend time playing computer games on a PC and console. I also ride a bike from time to time. More so now after being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. Watching TV, and playing network games with the kids is also among the things I do, while I encourage them to play on a local network rather than online – but that will contribute to another story, about online gaming. My children follow both my wife’s and my example, which is greatly influenced by the way that we grew up when we was their age.

As I browse the headlines today I see that that kidnapped Chinese workers have been freed in Darfu, Atari files for bankruptcy, Boeing halts deliveries of the 787 dreamliner, the central bank of Japan moves to boost economy. In Central and South Asia Karzai calls for and investigation into prison torture, Bangladeshi TV preacher sentenced to death. But in little New Zealand reparations paid by criminals is going uncollected, Novapay is still causing issues for school teachers, Marmite could be back on the shelves and an economist tries his hand at working in the New Zealand media.

I’m referring to Gareth Morgan who has decided that cats need to be culled. According to Morgan “Cats – they kill for pleasure.” Cats, as far as I have observed over the years of living with various cats, don’t kill for pleasure. One could argue that there is only one species that kills for pleasure. They used to kill for food. The we took away the need to kill for food but left the instinct there. According to John Innes from Landcare Research cats are both part of the problem and solution. Cats do kill native birds but they also kill ship rats which prey on native birds as well. I do agree with the registering of cats for many reasons. Keeping cats inside is possible but they would need to be given a place that they can climb and exercise freely. Without this cats will start to suffer from cabin fever just like humans do after being shut in all the time.

Marmite is set to be back on the supermarket shelf after a long absence. I for one am looking forward to getting the yeast spread back in our cupboard. I have been fortunate enough to have been allowed a few slices of Marmite laden toast from time to time from my sister who has returned from Brussels with a couple of large jars of the black gold from their stock they had delivered to them from various friends and family that had visited them while they were on posting. This is significant for New Zealand as Marmageddon has been going on for quite a while now.

One of the things that surprised me about Marmageddon is that it basically happened over night. I remember going to the supermarket looking on the shelf and found a sign reporting that the supplier was out of stock. I took this to be the supplier was out of stock rather than Sanitarium. It was no big problem. We went to another supermarket and bought it from there. Only the next day did it break on the news. What I fail to believe is that someone in Christchurch went into the warehouse and suddenly found that the stocks had run dry. There has been millions of dollars spent on creating stocking tracking and inventory software that would have been able to tell the people at Sanitarium how long their supplies would have been able to last after they were unable to continue production. Obviously this was a tactic to stop people going out and stocking up on the product and to allow fair product distribution and pricing until the very end.

Just a quick word on safety. A Wellington motorcyclist who hit a sheep said he could have been killed if he had not been wearing good safety gear. This is a classic case of how the right mentally when it comes to safety can save a life. On my travels in the car I often have to frequent a stretch of road that is not only narrow but also has a level rail crossing. No I’m not talking about some back road on the way to some rural area. This crossing is in the Wellington suburb of Johnsonville. I was always taught to slow down at a level crossing and check for trains from either direction before crossing. One would not be surprised at the number of level crossing deaths after watching the number of cars that go straight across the level crossing without checking if the way is clear. Yes the crossing has lights and bells.

The interesting thing about this section of road is that not more than 200 meters away you will find a police car sitting on a straight stretch of road watching for speeding motorists. I have also observed said police car just sitting on the side of the road with no takers from their friendly warning and financial incentive. I have yet to see one police car watching motorists on this stretch of road and issuing ‘warnings’ about the dangers of level crossings or driving on narrow roads.

"The only gracious way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can't ignore it, top it; if you can't top it, laugh at it; if you can't laugh at it, it's probably deserved." --Russell Lynes

Just a quick update. There have been a few things happening behind the scenes. I have uploaded a few new photos to the Misc Funnies gallery.

I have also started coding a mates site so that its easier for him to do updates on his site that is hosted on my server Ink Blot. I'm going to be keeping it looking the same but will be adding an admin section and also a Gallery with thumbnail generator so that is taking up a bit of my time as I will also have to add in all his updates.

Other than that there is not a lot else happening around here. I did go fishing the other day on a mates boat. I must remember to take my camera along with me next time as we did see a seal swimming in the water. Would have been good to get a shot of that. Didn't catch much but it was a lot of fun and it got me thinking that it would be nice to have a boat some day soon. Maybe its my midlife crisis calling.

Sent an email to a mate requesting some of his 3D grass. I must have been a bit tired and a little sarcastic so I put in greetings and little notes into it for the poor person who was going to have to read it because I put the word grass in there. I'm sure that is not the case these days and there are complicated algorithms involved that would have ruled the email away from being criminal but it was mostly for the laugh

Just on a side note. Noticed in the news this morning that Eric Sykes has died. I remember him mostly for the Goon Show.

Kryton

After a lot of mucking around online I have decided to remove myself from facebook. Yip I deactivated my account. The general idea is that if you need to get a hold of me you already know how and if you wanted to contact me you should have done so before.

Part of the other reason is that I don't want the information that facebook will sell to others for data mining. But wait I hear you say they still have your email address because you can reactivate your account. If you have come to my page through way of google then you might not have noticed the url. Yes this is my domain and I also have the emails for this as well. I had an aliases for my facebook account and that has also been removed as well.

So if you have wanted to know what I'm up to these days then this is the place to come. If your just looking around keep an eye on this site as its going to grow. For everyone else I'll just say "Hi"

Kryton

This one was just made me laugh in the right way that I had to add it

Kryton

I know its been a while since I have put thing up on this site other than new pictures. I haven't forgot about it its just that I don't have a lot to put up. Things have been changing and I've been working on things in the back ground.

To give you an idea on the type of things that I have been working on. I've been looking at putting in a RSS feed for the different pages, including photos section, as well as a mailing list that would notify when a new update/photo has been posted. To this end I have been building a mail server that would allow me to access it from everywhere using squirrel mail.

Obviously I'm never going to compete with those wonderful social network sites out there but this has been an interesting experience over the 6ish years that I've been playing with this. As always if you have a suggestion then just let me know as I'm always open to new ideas

Kryton

I have spent a lot of time working on the code around this site to make things eaiser on my self. Things like this update are not entered manually, no big deal I hear you say I do that all the time on fabebook, twitter, youtube .... but most people haven't designed and written the code behind those sites.

I will openly admit that the page to enter this update is not very pritty but it get this and other enteries done. But now it is time to look into making the site a bit more readable to you.

This is going to include a major redesign from juni0r which includes new images but I have also learnt that some little things like images makes the reading of updates a little eaiser.

To this end people I'm going to make more of an effort to take my camera with me when going on trips so that I can include images in the updates that I enter

As always I'm open to suggestions so please let me know

Kryton

Once again we are back up and running again. Web services have been restored and I'm looking forward to adding some new features to the site like RSS feeds for each page and also email lists as well.

I know a lot of the information on the pages in the site are a little out of date. This was due to me playing around with the hardware that the web server was running on. To put a long story short a power cut had caused issues on my freeNAS box that cause issues with file that was being used for the iSCSI target causing a lot of data to get lost, lets say over 1TB worth of data went west.

This meant that I had to restore from an old back. Lots of different lessons learnt from this to say the least. I should have known better and there is no way I would do the things that I did at home in my job but it is a case of needs must

Kryton

I have recoded the site so that it makes it a little easier for me. There are a few things that are not quite working and I will be working on these over the next few days but please let me know if you find something that is not working so that I can add it to the list.

I have also been able to move this site to another server that I hope should be able to make things go a bit faster from the old server.

There will be a redesign of the site coming soon but I'm waiting on a time when I can get together with the designer and nut this out. When I do you will know about it

Other than that if there is anything else just let me know by using the link on the left

Kryton.

Have had this around for a while. It was recorded on my phone a few years ago and then converted to MP3.

I did have this embedded but it was causing problems with different browsers and players so I'm just going to link it for now

James Reading

Kryton