This is fucking ridiculous. Who even would you be tipping in this situation? Guarantee that none of the actual workers see a penny of these "tips", and that it all goes back into corporate budgets.

You have my deepest sympathies. It'll be 3 years for me too in a month's time, since my dad died. Still feels pretty raw sometimes. Here's to you and yours

I'm in Wellington, but they're apparently everywhere - just we tend not to notice them since they're pretty small and like live under leaves and stuff

Harvested potatoes this morning and was pleasantly surprised by the haul from my tiny plot. Gotta figure out what to plant in the space next - maybe some pumpkin

My son, after watching a YouTube video where the Paw Patrol had a barbecue competition, decided that we needed to also get a BBQ - I was inclined to agree. So this morning I've headed out and bought the family the finest mid-price kettle that mitre 10 has to offer.

Now I can spend the Christmas break subjecting my family to my sure to be mediocre attempts at BBQing.

I know, been kinda conditioned to expect the worst but yeah this seems like great progress. Still has to go through Chris Bishop but from what I understand he's not likely to oppose this stuff.

I'm lucky enough to have Ruru in my back garden. While I rarely, if ever, see them I do often hear them gently hooting throughout the night, and I love them for that.

I'm way under qualified to comment on the efficacy of the rat poison drops, but my impression is that they are generally seen as a necessary evil in the fight to protect native wildlife. There's definitely a fringe, but vocal, anti 1080 (the most prominent poison used) movement, but that's less rooted in environmental concern and more on conspiracy theories: 1080 activism: Going down the conspiracy 'wormhole'

It is worth noting that poison drops aren't the only tool employed. There's been some massive victories in the Wellington region using trapping to eliminate rats (and other pests such as stoats) from a large area of the capital: Rats, stoats and weasels eliminated from Miramar

There's a good Tom Scott video on the efforts going on to remove rats from the Wellington region: This is "impossible", but New Zealand is trying anyway

I created that linked post, and it genuinely was a heads up to people who might be commuting that there may be disruption. I hadn't seen these protests mentioned anywhere and as it was getting late in the evening I thought it best to post to the main community to reach the most people in a timely fashion.

Granted I could have posted without linking or providing details on the protests, but I felt that it was necessary to have some information so people had an idea what sort of disruption they might expect (and so could plan accordingly).

I personally don't think it's reasonable to require everything politically adjacent to be exclusively restricted to the politics community. Doing so would limit the usefulness of this instance and it's ability to provide useful information to users.

I flew domestic from Wellington this morning and was still required to take out laptops - though this was Jetstar.

2FA would probably be part of the answer: whereby you get a text / app notification with a unique code to confirm a transaction. Not always convenient, I pretty much always sigh when having to use them, but at least significantly harder for people to spoof.

I can imagine a future, not that far off, where physical cards are obsolete, and phones are the primary identifying factor in everyday transactions.

But yeah that whole not honoring transactions from a near(ish) to expiry card thing is total BS. I'd be looking to ditch Skinny if that happened to me.

Hearsay from a relative-of-a-friend-who-works-for-the-water-board is that they're looking at rolling outages to ensure supply.

NuGet. The whole package management experience just feels so disjointed and tacked sometimes.

• VS package management is (search, upgrade) slow and buggy
• Central Package Management works for the CLI but is not implemented properly in VS, and is not available for Framework projects
• The Azure credential manager, for Azure based NuGet feeds, is hard to configure reliably
• Don't even start me on issues querying / publishing NuGet packages via PowerShell

I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention Zealandia when talking about the return of native birds to the capital. It's large sanctuary in the city suburbs that's completely surround by a 1.8 - 2.2m (6.2 - 7.2 ') predator exclusion fence. This area allows native birds a space to thrive without rat predation. It's been so successful that threatened birds are growing in numbers and returning to areas outside of the sanctuary - good example being the Kaka (not an owl but still superb) which seem to growing steadily in number in my area.

I would guess around 3mm for that one. I've never seen them either but happened to look down and saw it crawling on me while gardening

Yeah I totally didn't see this weather coming - which is why I did some exterior painting this morning 🤦‍♂️

Took my 4 year old to the Dinosaurs of Patagonia exhibition at The Papa this morning. It's fucking spectacular. I wasn't really expecting all that much from it, and it is fairly tame to begin with, but the final exhibits are pretty amazing. Kid loved it too.

Seems to have been mostly Wellington, with a few elsewhere. From an archive of their stores page I count:

• Wellington: 14
• Auckland: 2
• Christchurch: 1

That was an absolutely excellent game, and great start to the tournament. Really looking forward to going to see Netherlands vs USA next week

Nah didn't do the full thing, just went from Crofton Downs station to Mt Kaukau and back again. That way I wasn't reliant on cars or needing people to pick me up / drop me off - which you kinda need if you're going all the way to / from the Makara end

Something to check out this weekend if you've got little ones (though Sunday's forecast looks a bit wet)