Sponsorship

As you may or may not know, my employer, ANZ National Bank, is a major sponsor of sport in New Zealand. With the National Bank brand, they sponsor the Black Caps, New Zealand's cricket team. As ANZ, they sponsor netball, and more recently, the Rugby World Cup and the New Zealand Olympic team. As part of the sponsorship deal, they run competitions for customers and members of the public. Staff are usually precluding from entering these competitions, so they also run internal competitions exclusively for staff, through the Staff Supporters Club.

As the build-up to the Olympics began in June, the official sponsorship deal was revealed, and a number of competitions unveiled. Prizes included travel to the UK and tickets to the Olympics, but there were also other competitions, with other prizes. I entered one of these, and thought no more of it...until Monday, when I received a phone call telling me that I was one of four winners in New Zealand for this particular competition: A new 42" HD 3D LED television, and a party pack so I can host a party, in time for the rowing finals on Friday night (at which New Zealand are expected to do well).

After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing and faffing about (the details of which I won't bore you with) it was delivered this afternoon, and I set it up earlier this evening. It has the wifi's. It has the bigger GBs (careful - contains swearies). It can Facebook, and Quikflix, and Skype - so we'll be able to Skype you from our sofa, like Lord & Lady Muck (once I get a camera installed - probably this weekend). So those dinosaurs out there (you know who you are) who haven't set up Skype yet: get cracking! And we'll see you on a TV near us soon!

It looks like this:

Me gusta!

Sunny Day

On Thursday and Friday, the sun came out and the temperature in Wellington headed up and started to nudge 20°; whilst the rest of the country basked in the mid-20s, Wellington is always a few degrees cooler – in every way! I decided that the time had come to put modesty and all feelings of decorum to one side, and expose the lower halves of my legs to an unsuspecting Wellingtonian public.

Predictably, come Saturday, the sky clouded over and, whilst it wasn’t cold, it wasn’t as warm as the last couple of days. We had guests over for dinner, so I cooked a Mediterranean-themed selection of tapas and we had a relaxed evening centred on the consumption of wine in industrial quantities.

On Sunday morning, the weather had changed again, back to sunny skies. We decided to take advantage of this and go back to visit the Botanical Gardens, which were in the grip of winter last time we went. Now, the roses are out in the rose garden, and we were able to sit outside the café with carefree abandon. We took lots of picture of the roses…here’s one:

A rose

After that, we headed back home for a spot of lunch, then out again to the bustling metropolis for retail opportunities, to buy appropriate summer footwear for the coming months – you can only walk so far in flip-flops (or “jandals” as they’re known here) without your feet starting to ache. Now we feel as if we’re heading into summer properly…or “Christmas” as they call it. It does seem odd to see all the stuff usually associated with midwinter in the shops as the weather warms up…doubtless we’ll get used to it.

Later in the afternoon the weather turned back to grey overcast, so we stayed in and watched the All Blacks hammer the Scots; then The Return Of The King, followed by Kung Fu Panda. Both very good films, for entirely different reasons.

High Definition

When we moved into the flat, the landlord kindly supplied us with a 20” CRT television with a connection to the analogue signal in Wellington, together with a VCR. That’s a Video Cassette Recorder – remember them? Now, the analogue signal in Wellington isn’t great due to the hilliness, and deteriorates even further during bad weather, so I looked around for upgrading this equipment. Turns out that the flat has both a Sky dish and a UHF aerial attached, so it was a question of deciding whether we wanted to go the whole hog and get Sky, or whether the Freeview digital service would suffice.

Well, we didn’t move to New Zealand to watch television, and as we’re not really into watching televised sport, the Sky option seemed superfluous to our needs. Yesterday we had delivered a new flat-screen, full-HD, 100Hz Freeview TV. It’s lovely! So now we can watch Shortland Street http://tvnz.co.nz/shortland-street in high definition…not that we watch Shortland Street, of course.

Home Blog

Yes, this is the first blog that I’ve actually been able to post from the comfort of my own home! Telstra have finally connected us to the telephone and internetworks, so no more USB sticks and internet cafés for me!

As a consequence of this, I ordered food off the internet for the first time here. The websites and ordering process aren’t as slick as UK online grocery sites – in many respects, technology and internet stuff seems to lag behind by a few years here. I’ll see how good they are at not substituting items, and delivering on time (2.5 hour delivery slots! Sheesh! You don’t know how spoilt you are with your ocado.com!) when it arrives on Monday.

Technology: they’re just about starting to do television broadcasts in HD. Sky, who usually lead in these things, won’t be broadcasting full HD until next year, apparently. And we might be getting DAB radio next year as well.

They Do Things Differently Here

For a country that is one of the largest dairy producers in the world, the range of cheese on offer is disappointing. Cheese seems to come in 4 flavours: Edam, Swiss, Colby, and Tasty. After that you have to go looking for expensive handmade cheeses, or imported cheese, so far as I can tell. I shall have to investigate further.