Interesting dilemma on the train this morning, and it didn’t have anything to do with the route being changed from the timetable route, nor that it had fewer carriages than what is the schedule.

No the dilemma has nothing to do with State Rail still fiddling with their broken timetable 4 months after introducing it and spending more of our money on their celebration parties.

On the ride this morning we enjoyed another passenger who was walking up and down the carriages begging for some of our ‘spare change.’ with the Guard station cutting the carriages into two disconnected cars, that’s 2 carriages he wandered up and down.

In the hustle and bustle of our lives, what do we have to offer those less fortunate. In what manner can we meaningfully contribute? Would giving cash hand outs contribute, or is it more practical to do something else.

The old guy seems lucid enough and isn’t seeking anything but money (and he knows his time on the train is limited until a guard finds out he’s riding free.) He’s bundled warm enough for the weather, for now during the day, but he’s got to have a base somewhere or he’s freezing at night. (Freezing to death at night seems more likely?)

Is our personal standards for ‘contribution’ too rigid a system, or do we just not have the flexibility to consider each applicant as they come?

Which homeless centre cares for this man? Which Church or private organisation disassociated from me helps this man? What will he have to eat this morning, day. Will he eat at all?

While we listen and focus on the human tragedy that is Haiti, what would you do on an encounter like this much closer to home?

The world economic crisis led by Bankers’ greed must have hit Tonga pretty badly this year.

The past week led to 2 visits by Tupou College ex-Students, apparently representing interests of another college in Tonga (Mo’unga’olive.)

Our first guests visited upon us a bag/tangai full of frozen cassave/manioke.

The economic downturn must really be bad in Tonga, ‘cause I can assure you that after hours of cooking that manioke, the thing was still as solid as a block of ice. I hope my dad didn’t pay as much for it as I expected.

Ko e manioke ni ia na’a mo e puaka ‘e hehengi ke kai mei ai.

The bag is in the deep freezer while we gradually whittle it down into our rubbish pick-up.

Our second visit was from a senior member of the Mo’unga’olive College, enroute to pester and bribe someone else.

Unfortunately for us he offloaded some smoked fish / ika masima, and dried octopi, feke momoa. To add salt to the injury, insult, he then turned around and said:

‘Oku fiema’u ‘eku Powerpoint, projector ke ngaue’aki. Keke feinga’i mai ee?

Tali: Mahalo ko ha lea ena ke ke fai ki ha’o fa’ee tangata ?

It’s a good thing the Minister came with others who respected him or he would have gotten a significantly disrespectful mouthful. By all accounts, something this Minister needs in quantity.

Food not fit for pigs = $100+

1 dried octopi, 5 smoked fish = 1 computer projector =~ $600 ?

How expensive has life become in Tonga, or more importantly how much is the cost of honesty?

If the church leads in amoral behaviour in Tonga, is the economic crisis, or political crisis less a danger?

The flight route was a little awry, handling four little kids at the airport means whatever time you have left to get to the gate, isn’t enough.

At Sydney airport Sesilia wanted to go to the toilets, so we split up after customs and ‘Ofa took off with Sesilia to find the toilets while I gathered what was left of the unpacked carry-on and shuttled the two elder ones to our gate (and geezzz how far away it was.)

Renovation work at Sydney International meant that we entered the ‘system’ at one end, to find the gate was at the ‘other’ end of the gate system.

They closed the boarding gate behind us, as the last travellers down the ramp.

In Auckland.

Disembarking in Auckland was another adventure with Sisitoutai needing to go to the toilet so we split again, going separate ways to find toilets.

After those niceties out of the way, the gate allocation doesn’t exist for the flight from Auckland to Tonga, but we observe a number of the ‘mob’ hanging around a general area.

Aahhh, this must be where the frequent flyers hang-out.

1st Night.

One has  but to experience each time, reminders are not enough.

Other than meeting the clan again, having a huge ‘umu dinner at 10:00 at night (wonder why Tongans are big?,) the memorable thing about returning was that first night-time shower.

I near dislocated my shoulders flapping my hands scrubbing like mad in the vain hope to fool my body into thinking that we were actually warm and the buttocks et. al. were not really freezing cold from the water.

There was a quick cure to laziness. Note to self: for the rest of the stay, revert to the hot water in bucket to warm up the cold water and bath from the bucket.

Lesson #1: Learn how to bath from a bucket in the comfort of your shower with running hot-water.

1st Day.

Were we supposed to have done something today ? Most things disappeared in a haze since we’re quite jet lagged from caring for the kids and the mad rush.

 

Had the obligatory visit to the clan coinciding with (surprise?) a huge ‘umu lunch and the obligatory spit-pig. Whilst those who can control themselves waited for lunch, the younger generation mum’s gorged themselves on the poor pig, leaving the other meat nice and intact.

The young kids were practising their dance for the gathering, although it seemed that at this rate, 100 dances will have been tried, and none known by the day. Music was hip to listen to.

 

We have the obligatory banana under the mango tree, and Sesilia was on our third trip to get more bananas when we had the uncomfortable experience of being snapped by one of the dogs. Mangy mutt masquerading as a nice dog snuck up quietly and took a big bite on my leg. Mangy critter didn’t even growl until after he’d taken his bite.

Fortunately the bite went on two layers of pants cloth and didn’t draw blood (or infect) but geezzz dogs have a strong jaw snap.

Lesson #2: Dogs that bite don’t always growl before they bite you.

2nd Day.

Quick Note: We’re tying up the dogs, and in the process we get a daylight snap.

Dog #2 takes another snap. Broad daylight attack, we’ve finished tying up the placid nice dog when another dog walks around me quietly and takes a snap.

Not as good a grab at me as the previous bite, but no pants in the way so this bite took some blood if not flesh.

Lesson #3: Wear long pants around dogs, something strong like corduroy/denim seems a good idea.

From: Talanoa Oceania [mailto:talanoaoceania@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, December 05, 2009 10:40 AM
To: Tasilisili
Cc: jione havea
Subject: FW: An Old Monkey Story With A New Ending

Hange eni ha talanoa mei Initia!

A hat-seller who was passing by a forest decided to take a nap under one of the trees, so he left his whole basket of hats by the side. A few hours later, he woke up and realized that all his hats were gone.. He looked up and to his  surprise, the tree was full of monkeys and they had taken all his hats.

The hat seller sits down and thinks of how he can get the hats down. While thinking he started to scratch his head. The next moment, the monkeys were doing the same.

Next, he took down his own hat, the monkeys did exactly the same. An idea came to his mind.

He took his hat and threw it on the floor and the monkeys did that too. So he finally managed to get all his hats back.

Fifty years later, his grandson, also became a hat-seller
and had heard this monkey story from his grandfather.

One day, just like his grandfather, he passed by the same forest. It was very hot, and he took a nap under the same tree and left the hats on the floor.

He woke up and realized that all his hats were taken by the monkeys on the tree. He remembered his grandfather’s words, started scratching his head and the monkeys followed. He took down his hat and fanned himself and again the monkeys followed.

Now, very convinced of his grandfather's idea, he threw his hat on the floor but to his surprise, the monkeys still held on to all the hats..

Then one monkey climbed down the tree,

An interesting announcement in Tonga letting organisations register themselves online. Great new service feature although of what little I know of the business’ in Tonga the number of organisations who are capable of taking advantage of this new service has to be significantly and there are a number of alternative IT services that could have been instigated (at a lower cost) with higher value for both the Government and Private Sector.

Tonga’s Electronic Company Registry, 1st in the Pacific Goes Live Today

Tuesday, 01 December 2009 14:36 administrator GOVERNMENT - Ministries & Departments

1 December 2009

Today, the Ministry for Labour, Commerce & Industries announced …the launching of the new electronic company registry. The Registry, the first of its kind for a sovereign nation in the Pacific, simplifies business registration procedures and reduces the time it takes to start a business.

…

"The system makes it easier for business to register and, once they do, will house their records securely and safely online," …

Tonga is the first nation in the Pacific to have such an electronic registry, and this system is based on the same software used in the New Zealand Companies Office. Firms bringing in their registration documents will have the paperwork entered into the electronic system by Ministry staff …

To ensure all records are transferred online, the Tongan government requires all companies to re-register within six months. …

ENDS

Issued by the: Ministry of Labour, Commerce and Industries, Nuku'alofa.

Just to be pedantic.

IFC, financed by the World Bank and New Zealand, modifies software the New Zealand Government has already paid for. Implements this in Tonga as part of New Zealand’s and WB general Pacific Aid program. I hope this was a ‘grant.’

It’s good to see they’ve gone for implementing something that already ‘works’ and hopefully there were enough skills on both sides (from their side and our side, [however that’s defined]) to make sure the idiosyncrasies of the local populace are adapted into the ‘system.’ (And I don’t mean liliu faka-tonga ee ngaahi fo’i lea fakapapalangii.)

Security ? Did anyone mention Security ?

It seems the above package is such a great deal, they the Government of Tonga has to relinquish all control of the system and let it be operated in “New Zealand.” The press releases aren’t too clear on the details, but for some absurd reason recent hacks on Australian Government websites do not preclude me from thinking that just because the stupid thing is in New Zealand isn’t going to make it any more secure than the Tongans in New Zealand?

Did we not just get a security alert this month regarding Man in the Middle Hijack’s of HTTPS (SSL) connections ? Warnings only came out last month (November) has the ‘system’ been updated and tested.

OpenSSL TLS Session Renegotiation Plaintext Injection Vulnerability

A vulnerability has been reported in OpenSSL, which can be exploited by malicious people to manipulate certain data.

The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the TLS protocol while handling session re-negotiations. This can be exploited to insert arbitrary plaintext before data sent by a legitimate client in an existing TLS session via Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks.

Successful exploitation may allow e.g. sending an arbitrary HTTP request under an authenticated context if certificate-based authentication is used by the server.

English Translation: Secured web access is a fat dream until this is fixed.

When the next big vulnerability occurs, is there a reputable process for reviewing the risks and implementing a change process, or do we just cross our fingers and hope the whackers go somewhere else?

It would be sad to hear that Tonga also becomes the 1st country in the Pacific with it’s electronic Company Registry republished out of Russia.

Not that we’re too used with Government sharing information about the risks they' are taking with our private data, but this project is rather extensive in the private information they store and make available on the Internet. It may have been a good time to be ahead of the game in having some processes and audit systems in place ?

Australia and New Zealand have their ISO standard 27001:2006 that provides a framework to maximise security of the service and your private data. Do Tonga corporations deserve the same level of protection, or is it OK to let it slide in the Pacific?

Don’t worry, they won’t notice.

Very near and recent security breaches include:

Hacked: Ministry of Information, Tonga (Today Dec 1st) – Joomla website (nice and beautiful Web Content Management System, but seems to be high on the list of hackable systems with plenty of security alerts every week.)

Joomla seems to be the flavour of the month with the Government of Tonga at the moment (“it’s easy”) so hopefully the crude, rude statement above doesn’t start showing up on the rest of the unpatched systems for Tonga.

And don’t even go to one of those links to the site, just don’t do it until the site is fixed.

Hacked: Australian Prime Minister’s Website (September, 2009)

The prime minister's website has been hacked into in protest over proposed reforms of internet censorship.

The website, www.pm.gov.au, was brought down at about 7.20pm (AEST) on Wednesday night along with that of the Australian Communications and Media Authority, but both were back online about an hour later.

Hacked: JB Hifi (Today Dec 1st, 2009)

JB Hi-Fi's websites in Australia and New Zealand were redirecting customers to malicious web pages over the weekend in a cyber attack in the lead-up to Christmas.

The exact details of the attack are not yet clear as the retailer has refused to comment but users first started reporting problems on Friday night.

Visitors to jbhifi.com.au reported being automatically redirected to Chinese websites carrying malware. Similar issues affected JB Hi-Fi's New Zealand website, which is hosted on the same server.

Those with anti-virus software and fully patched internet browsers would have been alerted to the security issue upon visiting the page but people without up-to-date protection could be infected without even knowing.

Liability, Culpability

And what happens when after repeated concerns from company clients, data loss continues to leak and damage occurs to the a company through this data loss?

News this week points at Restaurants in the USA suing the vendor of a credit payment point of sale device that allowed identities of clients to be stolen costing these restaurants millions in penalties, operational reviews,

Threat Level Privacy, Crime and Security Online

Restaurants Sue Vendor for Unsecured Card Processor

Seven restaurants have sued the maker of a bank card-processing system for failing to secure the product from a Romanian hacker who breached their systems.

The restaurants, located in Louisiana and Mississippi, have filed a class-action suit against Georgia-based Radiant Systems for producing a point-of-sale (POS) system that they say was not compliant with payment card industry security standards and resulted in an undetermined number of customers having their debit and credit card numbers stolen.

We got late to church by about 10 minutes on Sunday so whilst we walked in the congregation and choir finished off the 1st hymn and we walk into the introductory/evocation(?) prayer.

Looking around, it looks as if we are early with nearly half the space still available.

The ‘setuata’ (head steward) starts his prayer and after a few nods, he’s still going. At the end of the program, it seems quite real that this prayer was the longest thing out.

I remember, in an earlier life, walking into another church service, in another town. The congregation were ‘tardy’ in getting to the service, I think we had visiting speakers that day, and when the chair of the program started with prayer, he prayed on and on and on, until the church was filled up.

Must have been some powerful prayers that day. This day, no one came in after us. God must have been out ?

Something seems to have gone without mention on the globe. Windows Mobile 6.5 build 23075, as accounted for in the cooked roms from xda-developers.com … supports flash!!

Woo hoo, now I can just click through on my mobile to flash video content and just watch it there on my phone.

 

• Windows Mobile 6.5 build 23075
• Internet Explorer
  • ROMs HTC Elfin (Miky, AHEN)

No one seems to have made any noise about this, but the Zune HD browser doesn’t support watching videos (strange for a music/video/entertainment device) so here’s hoping that Microsoft will soon release a firmware update to resolve this abnormality.

Edit, (cue: some hours later) I guess I should get more intimate with mobile tech. It seems that what I am observing is not flash players, but some sort of integration of Youtube Player and IE. I tried one of my other online video haunts (http://www.stupidvideos.com) and things weren’t so moviesh.

OpenBSD Fanboys woke up to this year’s NOC report from Defcon 2009 with some vindication, validation, and just general “whooo haaaaa”

Wired Magazine recently updated their ‘coverage’ of the network construction for Defcon 2009 Las Vegas under the title “Inside the worlds most hostile network”, a follow-up to 2008’s “A First ever look inside the Defcon Network Operations Center” with a clientele that lists:

* circa 10,000 hackers, crackers, feds, spies, corporates, and noobs

* 100 GB Internet download traffic in 2 days

To cater for the connectivity requirements of this hostile collection (excluding voice services, presumably.) The Goons set up:

* 50 wireless access points, each in their VLAN

* 25 wired VLANs

* Mirrored ports for general access to monitoring traffic

* Secured Toilet and Sink (critical)

* Physical separation of sensitive equipment

* Ceiling access (to place and secure the wireless access points)

* Cables

* Booz (better known as liquid refreshments)

The amazing thing are the people/Goons who put the system together, and their choice of tools shortlisted to being:

* 50 wireless access points, Aruba (AP-70 noted as the model for 2008)

* Aruba Rack (handles encryption et. al. for access points)

* OpenBSD pf – firewall

* Cacti for GUI monitoring

Whoo haaa

Why not? Putting the kids to sleep so Y not use the phone? I prefer a real keyboard, but obviously twitters show there's lot's doing it on the small screen. And someone actually wrote most of a novel (that made money) If I had a real kboard I could see my blogging working more consistently

We had a confusing question for the kids at Sunday three weeks ago,

What are the Israelites supposed to do to get God’s blessings from the serpent on the stick that Moses held up ?

The kids stared at the Minister’s symbolism, and came up with every answer except that which the Minister wanted. Sometimes the answer to God’s mysteries aren’t so mysterious.

In another place and another time,

Serpents

Kerry Stewart: Do you find that people from Oceania and indigenous people here in Australia, because they have stories that are positive towards snakes, might read Genesis differently, that would influence them?

Jione Havea: Yes, I do hope that people, indigenous people from Australia as well as from the Islands in the Pacific Ocean would have positive readings of the Genesis story. But it's also - I think there's another challenge there, people from outside of our societies need to learn our stories as well, and this is something that I need to confront as an educator; I'm here as a Polynesian teaching a Western story. I think people of the West also need to learn of our stories. But yes, my answer to this question is yes, I hope people from outside of the Western mainstream would bring their stories and allow those stories to help them see the biblical stories in a new light. And this is one of those stories.

ABC Radio had a few questions of their own on snakes and the church, listen to the audio or read the transcript.

Thanks to David Harris we have the following valuable information for our youth in Sydney.

From: Majidi Warda [mailto:Majidi.Warda@blacktown.nsw.gov.au]
Sent: Tuesday, 10 March 2009 02:07 PM
To: Lisa Khodeir
Subject: Youth Scholarship $5000!

Youth Off The Streets is a charity that mostly works with homeless, drug addicted and abused young people in Australia.

Youth Off The Streets have a national Scholarship Program, targeted at young people from difficult backgrounds who wish to further their education or training.

The program offers scholarships of $5000 to young people who would otherwise find it difficult to achieve their vocational goals without some support.

The scholarships are to be used over a 2 year period and YOTS staff develop a scholarship pathway plan with the young person and assist them to follow it through.

If you are aware of any young people who access your service and may
benefit from a Youth Off The Streets Scholarship, we welcome your
nominations.
The nomination forms are also available on our website
http://www.youthoffthestreets.com.au/scholarship/index.html

Regards,
Chantal Harris

Chantal Harris
Youth Off the Streets
Scholarship Program
(02) 93303536
0406815409

Majidi Warda
Community Development (Youth & Early Life)
Blacktown City Council
PO Box 63, Blacktown 2148
Tel: 9839 6086
Fax: 9831 1961
Mobile: 0423 020 422
majidi.warda@blacktown.nsw.gov.au

We’ve identified someone in our youth who might qualify, so we’ll get ourselves working on that ground. Maybe there’s someone in your area that can be helped hear ?

User ‘ovhefa1’ sent me the link below to some work they’ve done on putting up some photos, into a slideshow.

Quite a lot of love involved in this work, so if you’d like to see some of her/his work, follow through.

It’s a strange (as in eclectic) collection of photos and newspaper articles which highlights a number of different areas in Tonga’s history (and the specific ‘slideshow’ above has a great focus on the royal family.

Now, who is ‘ovhefa1’ ?

Apparently, yesterday’s induction service for our new Minister took 5 hours (2009.02.22)

Unfortunately, we were only able to last the first 2 hours and then our week spirits gave up and we came home. Meanwhile the sturdy in spirit continued the vigil and made it through the full FIVE hours. To wit, they were rewarded with the regular Tongan fair of food, food, and more food.

I guess if you have a Tongan thing going that you lose some face if you don’t feed people more than their in need. Can’t gather enough evidence to convict Tongans of gluttony.

Aptly put, the new minister before delivering his welcome/thanks address said (to wit):

I’ve been asked to make a ‘brief’ address, and I’m not sure whether this is a Tongan or Palangi ‘brief.’ …

To make a long story short … x 3

…

and I guess you can figure where that went.

Did I miss something or aren’t we supposed to be slowly moving away from Summer into Autumn ? It’s near February and we’re getting consistently warm/hot weather here.

Great for the older kids still on vacation, good weather for laying on the beach getting sun-burned while trying to look cool.

But ya gotta worry about all that BO on public transport at the end of the day.

There used to be a commercial on television about an insect repellent that you spray on your skin to keep the mosquitoes off your skin. “Remember the aeroguard, And have a good week-end”

Remember the anti-perspirant, and have a good afternoon (at least I’ll have a better one if you’ve got yours on.

As with many idiots out there, I’ve upgraded my current work environment from Windows Vista 32 bit to Windows 7.0. Only journalists put in that ‘warning’ to not install it on your production machine, but if you’re at home how many ‘production’ machines do you really have?

It is an unfortunate marketing decision to name the product Windows 7.0 as a result of the misinformed bad rap that the Vista brand has recieved, even if 90% of the code base is still Vista (my finger in the air guesstimate.) When it became obvious that the 7.0 monika is specifically designed to move away from Vista I was telling people how it rekindles memories of the Coke Classic marketing ‘genius’ of Coca-Cola.

Anyhow, 2 machines, 2 failed updates.

Full install (also known as all those files are gone.)

This reminded me of some files I was looking for late last month. A friend asked whether she could have some of the photos I took at her daughter’s 1st Birthday in 2006. Sure, no problem I’ve got all that stuff (he says with complete confidence.)

Another idiot.

it seemed that I have backups of files all around 2006 and that month of the Birthday, except for files within a week of the date of the supposed photos.

Hmmmm.

Just as I’ve now lost a weeks worth of photos, prior to this upgrade.

I wonder if that’s what happened to those 2006 photos? What did I upgrade then?

Of course I didn’t back up a few other things, but those are the Joy of being a boy with his toys (geeby geeks.)

Vista 7.0 Beta Experience

How is Vista 7.0? I love it so far, even if I haven’t really pushed the envelope of my normal Windows working environment. (only 5 days.)

If you love toys and have a machine that can deal with the hardware specifications, I would upgrade but then again I like a lot of stuff normal people wouldn’t touch?

Another case of mistaken identity.

There’s got to be something about the way I smell, or dress because it seems I’m culturally misconfigured.

Whilst at school in Texas I was somehow thought of as hispanic.

Now that I’m in Australia, this is the second time that I’ve been accosted and thought of as a Samoan ?

Is this a good thing ?

Meanwhile, the World Financial Crisis (tm) seems to have hit the City Rail Service. The morning and evening trains that I’m catching seem to be running minus 2 carriages. The fact that we’re packed tighter with 2 less carriages seems to imply that the patronage hasn’t wained (same number of people getting on, but less space to carry us.)

I sure hope the City Rail hierarchy didn’t get a Christmas bonus. ‘Cause we’re getting the wrong end of the shaft on the trains.

I’m always game for better video performance watching all these DivX etc. hanging around.

After a great deal of research, I found Media Player Classic Home Cinema. The big deal here is two things:

1. All codecs are "burned into" the Media Player Classic executable, so there's do dependency on whatever random codecs your PC happens to have installed (eg, ffdshow, cccp, Ivan's Krazy Elite Kodek Pak, etc).
2. It supports offloading video decoding duties to modern video cards. This is limited to recent Radeon HD models and nVidia 8 and 9 series. Fortunately, my HTPC motherboard includes an embedded Radeon HD 3200 -- and since I blew up my old one (it's a long story) the new version I just installed includes 128 megabytes of dedicated DDR3 video memory, too.

Coding Horror: Easy, Efficient Hi-Def Video Playback

Thanks to Jeff Atwood for always doing something interesting, and in these cases, something that may directly apply to our situation?

Funny I was listening to this old Rock n Roll piece about getting into trouble and not believing what was taught in Sunday School, but that’s another story.

We’re doing the Sunday School thang with the kids, and they absolutely love going to Sunday School. So much so, that they get up in the morning prepped to go, and as soon as Sunday School is over there’s a million reasons why we have to come home.

Funny to see how far we have come, not, when it comes to the Sunday School and the Tongan congregations.

The farthest I recall back with the Tongan community church services, is back to when services were held at the Pitt St. Chapel (hmmm, I’ll have to visit there some lunch time next time I’m in the city.) and at the 5 Rogers Avenue, Haberfield, Mission Centre (long since sold to the heathens with better financial management skills. (smiling)

  

The thing I recall is that we didn’t really have Sunday School for the Tongan Language at the Pitt St. church, and Sunday School at 5 Rogers Avenue was on a Monday evening.

On Monday evening’s the Sunday School members would gather with our teachers at the 5 Rogers Avenue Chapel (a small room part of the complex.)

Sometime later the Sunday School moved together with the main service to St. David’s Haberfield where they actually had a hall and separate rooms. So Sunday School developed into having separate classes and being in different parts of the hall. There were some material, but I’m not sure they were ours or ‘left-overs’ from the palangi church.

Something or someone did something and the congregation moved again to the Ashfield Uniting Church, and they too had a hall and rooms. Sunday school got bigger as we had more kids and plenty of volunteers to be teachers.

Bill Crews expanded his Exodus Foundation on the premises so Sunday School programs moved to the Minister’s Manse (i.e where the faifekau lived) but again we have plenty of space to spread out the classes.

I went on vacation into la la land and came back 10+ years later to find out that we’re back to using the main chapel for our Sunday School program, with only a single volunteer teacher.

  

Fiona’s busy being creative with a program that fits everyone, and the youngest children get activities they can do on the seats, or on the floor, while she puts in some more in depth time with the older kids.

Petersham Uniting Church – Tongan Congregation is definitely very fortunate to have Fiona on the team.

Well done Fiona.

Would you believe I got jacked/bumped off my Internet connection today?

I’m on Optus’ Cable Internet service, which isn’t hot but has been mostly stable and functional.

Recently I’ve been noticing some problems with the connection going down arbitrarily (kind of like the Internet back in Tonga.) looking at my tiny little router, it seems that it isn’t picking up the public-ip it normally gets from the ISP.

Looking at the address that I’m given, it looks like the “Surfboard” modem that’s plugged into the ISP suddenly decided that it wanted to give me some other IP through a DHCP server.

Imagine getting kicked off my own Internet by the very modem that’s supposed to be keeping me connected.

It’s scary what’s not configured on this thing (like no attempt at even having a password ?)

The kids are growing bigger and bigger, louder and noisier.

We’ve been attending Sunday School for a couple of weeks (our church’s schedule is kinda on and off whenever the church feels up to it.)

Unfortunately, the timetable is still a little screwed, so the kids decided they wanted to sit down and ‘hiva talitali’ while waiting for the rest of the mob to turn up.

Afterward it was just fun at home …

Yesterday we went to the park and afterwards we dropped by Grandma Fe and sang a few songs before getting back in the car for coming home.

The trip was short because you just can’t keep kids still at such an open space.

If it were only that would walk over the open space, but Sesilia likes to pick things up from other plots and just walk off with it. Must have something to do with her ‘motu’ roots?