ronin

Very cool(for me anyway) map of New Zealand from 1843. A couple of noticeable name differences are:

• New Ulster, New Munster, and New Leinster are the North, South and Stewart Islands respectively.
• Tasman Bay is known as Blind Bay(Tasman Bay of D’Urville).

This comes from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection which has plenty of other cool maps to checkout.

Checkout these YouTube videos for New Zealand Folk Parody duo Flight of the Conchords action.

My favourite is The Humans are Dead

They also have an upcoming HBO show! Which we’ll probably never get to see in the UK.

Stuff.co.nz has feeds now, I’m not sure if they had them all along and last time I looked I was blind but they’re there now.

Check it out: Sutff.co.nz feeds

Stuff has finally redesigned, it’s about time too. Only thing is, still no sign of any syndication via RSS or Atom.

It isn’t good reading if you’re a NZ cricket fan.

This competition is all about New Zealand vs. England, it isn’t worth even worrying about beating Australia until either team is in the final.

If New Zealand can find more than one batsmen to score their runs during an innings then we have a chance, otherwise we’re going into 2007 with a disappointing result against Sri Lanka, and no result from the Tri Series.

Stuff: ‘Dark day’ for league

Great Britain coach Brian Noble this week called for the Kiwis to lose their points for breaking the rules while Kangaroos coach Ricky Stuart called Fien’s selection “an embarrassment” to the Kiwis.

The Kiwi Rugby League team has been docked 2 points after fielding an ineligible player in last weekends test against Great Britain. After losing to Australia in the cricket yesterday this is just a kick in the teeth. I can’t believe that we need to field players who can’t really be considered eligible except by some highly questionable and liberal interpretation of the rules.

It’s true that there are a number of players in both the NZ and Australian camps that are eligible for either country, but having a parent or grandparent born in the players declared country is quite straight forward. Wouldn’t anybody thinking of applying the rule to great grandparents as well get confirmation first?

It’s condescending to the team, the player, and other players who are available for selection in that position. It takes away from all the hard work that the team put in after coming back off a loss in the first test against Australia, just losing the second, and then going on to win against Great Britain.

I really hope we win the rugby against England at Twickenham on Sunday otherwise I think I’m just going to go back to watching snooker for a while.

New Zealand has it’s very own Government news feed, which is where I pick up a few interesting changes to New Zealand life. This is probably useless to people living in NZ since it will all be on the national news at some stage, but when you are living overseas it is almost invaluable, until stuff gets some decent feeds anyway.

Looks like New Zealand is going ahead with the Kiwi Saver. The start date has been delayed to July 2007, but the details look much like they were first proposed. In general I agree with the whole idea, but it seems much like Winston Peters compulsory scheme from the 90’s that was voted out in a referendum.

I guess the details are probably different but the goal is the same: save more, spend less.

As a Kiwi living abroad it has little impact on my life, but maybe it can have an impact on the amount of saving my generation achieves which will have a huge impact for the future of New Zealand, a tiny society in the middle of the South Pacific.