Abstain for the All Blacks.

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Sean Fitzpatrick driving pink fist-shaped dodgem car.

In a week which saw unusually low and high pressure systems combine to suck air straight up to New Zealand from the Antarctic and heavy snow fell across the South Island, lower North Island and Auckland for the first time in 76 years, a deep PR anticyclone visited Telecom NZ and looks likely to hang around for some time. The NZ media is looking on in disbelief and outrage at Telecom NZ ‘Abstain for the All Blacks’ campaign, which, while not yet officially sanctioned and scheduled (if sanctioned) to start next week has been (intentionally or unintentionally) leaked. Continue reading →

NZ Barbarians and the Bledislow Cup.

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Sacrilegious on so many levels.

I’m excited. Tonight I get to use our NZ Barbarians membership card for the Bledislow Cup match (ABs v Australia) at Eden Park. How I came by this membership card is the subject of an earlier blog post, suffice to say it is all legitimate and they know we are coming. So, we dropped the children off at various friends houses where they will be staying the night and  head over to Eden Park.  Continue reading →

Move over Waitomo, Nikau Cave is the real deal.

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It’s a public holiday today in celebration of the Queen’s birthday. So we got-up early and were out of the house by 08.00 to travel 1½hrs south of Auckland to Nikau caves   where we had arranged a 10.00 tour of the caves. Nikau caves is set on a private farm and guided tours are given by arrangements by the farm owner. This is a propers cave, health and safety takes a little bit of a back seat, no so much to be unsafe but not so all pervasive that you feel like you don’t need to keep you wits about you. Continue reading →

Māori Challenge

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Welsh team paddle a traditional waka on the Waikato river in Hamilton.

I knocked-off work early this afternoon and travelled down to Hamilton with a lady from Tourism NZ to join the Wales squad on their day off in Hamilton. Through my contacts in  Tourism NZ I had arranged for the squad to paddle a waka (Māori war canoes) down the Waikato river  Continue reading →

Wales v ABs, Dunedin.

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Wales face the last haka at the House of Pain.

Up at 05.45 for a 07.45 flight to the Dunedin. The flight was uneventful apart from the presence of half of NZ’s media. In Dunedin we checked into the Living Space hotel which perhaps could be better named ‘only just enough living space’ hotel as the room
is literally one and a half times the size of the bed and we have to orchestrate movements before executing them (but a bargain at £32 per night).  Continue reading →

Telecom’s XT Launch

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‘s

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Faster in more places – like the K-Road prostitutes I was to run into early on launch day.

Telecom New Zealand’s decision in 2001 to adopt CDMA technology for its mobile network rather than GSM was, with hindsight, a bad decision. Like the Betamax / VHS story, CDMA may have been the better technology standard but, as most of the world adopted GSM, it became the default standard. For New Zealanders using a CDMA device, calling from overseas is not possible in certain countries (e.g. Australia) and the range of available phones is diminishing and starting to look decidedly dated as  handset manufacturers of are now stoping producing CDMA devices (which don’t use a SIM card). The game is all but over for the technology and Telecom is losing its share of the mobile market to Vodafone and its GSM network.

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With Buck at Ellerslie Raceday

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Always happy to help when people have Rugby questions. Here I provide Buck Shelford with the benefit of my rugby genius.

Today my very good friend Sam Walsh invited me to the NZ Rugby Foundation’s charity race day at Auckland’s Ellerslie racecourse (the charity raises money for injured players and other worthy causes). The Radio Network, which Sam works for, had a table on the Cuvée enclosure which is where the great and the good hang out and I half expect to appear in the background of celebrity gossip magazines photographs in the next week or so.

Continue reading →