We are staying in the Kensington area, which means the Kensington museums are all within walking distance, which is great. I’ve previously visited many other museums in London, but not the Kensington ones.

The Natural History Museum had massive queues, so we headed to the Victoria & Albert Museum. They claim to be the world’s great museum of art and design, and I reckon they well could be.

The museum is huge. We barely did half a floor in two and a half hours – and there are six floors. They have a collection of 4.5 million items and 145 galleries!! And no admission charges!

Samson slaying a Philistine

The Ascension of Mary

St Peter

That little dog like creature that St Michael is standing on, is actually Satan in dragon form.

I love this tapestry from around 1425. The bears look so happy despite it being a bear and boar hunt.

Moses

A plaster cast of the famous “David’ by Michelangelo.

A plaster cast of the tomb of Richard I, or Richard the Lionheart, at the Abbey of Fontevrault.

In the centre of the museum, is this lovely park and pond with a cafe.

I rate this museum as a must do. The only problem is you need a week just to get around it.

Vernon Small writes:

Speculation is rife that NZ First leader Winston Peters and his former adviser Michael Laws are to team up again as part of a “relaunch” of the party this year.

Neither Mr Laws, who is to stand down as Whanganui mayor this year, nor Mr Peters would confirm the rumours. But MPs from both sides of the House and sources close to NZ First said they were aware of plans.

One source said Mr Peters had indicated he wanted to relaunch the party this year.

The annual conference will be in Christchurch in late October.

Speculation about Mr Laws has focused on the Whanganui seat, held by National’s Chester Borrows with a majority of 6333.

But he has also been linked with Dunedin North, held by Labour’s Pete Hodgson, who is retiring.

If NZ First won an electorate seat, it would then qualify for list seats even if it fell short of the 5 per cent threshold.

Mr Laws said he had nothing to say about the issue. “I am not interested in talking to you at all.”

He is a former National and NZ First MP who quit Parliament in 1996 over a Napier City Council poll he had organised. The poll was signed off by a fictitious Antoinette Beck, who was later revealed to be Mr Laws’ parliamentary secretary, Louise Sampson.

If Michael thinks he can trust Winston, well good luck to him with that.

Ironically a Laws led NZ First would be far more palatable than a Winston led one, but I can’t see Winston handing over power.

UPDATE: The NZ First President says he knows nothing:

NZ First’s party president knows nothing of any plans for Michael Laws to stand for the party, and says he would know if such plans were afoot. …

NZ First president George Groombridge said he was confident he would be kept in the loop.

“I am in charge of the governance of the party… things are going along very, very smoothly and I would have heard if anything like that had happened because I am in constant touch with our leader.

“That’s a definite no.”

I would say the President is as much in the loop on Winston’s plans as he was about the Spencer Trust and those undeclared donations. You think he would have learnt a lesson by now.

UPDATE II: The MP.Peters stock on iPredict has gone from 15c to 35c today, so some people think it is happening.

The Herald reports:

BMW New Zealand customers will soon be able to surf the internet using the vehicle’s dashboard-mounted information display screen.

The company has announced that customers with a suitable screen, iDrive system and internet-capable mobile phone will be able to buy wireless internet functionality.

The system will allow BMW customers to access the internet and email, although drivers will only be able to view the web and email pages when the vehicle is stationary.

I like it. One of those BMWs will do nicely for my birthday present thank you very much.

I’m scheduled to do my oral submission to the Law & Order Committee Wednesday morning at 11.20, on Paul Quinn’s bill to remove voting rights from all prisoners, rather than just those serving sentences of three or more years.

Now a minor problem is I am in London, but they are kindly calling me at the apartment I am in. The only problem is it will be 12.20 am Thursday here. True dedication to be uo after midnight just to do an oral submission.

Of course I am the only submitter actually in favour of the bill, apart from the sponsor. So I feel an obligation to make an effort, so at least there will be a proper debate.

My written submission is here, for those interested.

TVNZ announced:

TV ONE’s political programme, Q+A will host the first Auckland super city mayoral debate LIVE this Sunday morning.

Mayors Andrew Williams, John Banks and Len Brown will be together for the first time on TV to debate who should be the inaugural super mayor of Auckland. All three sitting mayors join Q+A host Paul Holmes to discuss their vision for the future of the country’s biggest city.

What do they stand for? Who are they? What plans do the have to deal with Auckland’s traffic, waterfront and difficult transition into a single, unified city? Holmes will get the answers in this extended debate on Q+A, this Sunday, August 1 from 9am on TV One

Viewers who have questions for these leading candidates can email them in to: [email protected]

The decision to include Andrew Williams is a strange one as he will not even come third in my opinion. Either the debate should be the two leading contenders or all the Mayoral candidates. Ewen Gilmour should be there, if Williams is there. And at least Ewen is funny on purpose.

I blogged yesterday on how Labour had announced:

“Labour would support the lowering of the alcohol limit, because anything that will save lives on our roads is worth doing,” says Ms Fenton.

Readers helpfully suggested a number of policies for Labour, which meet their criteria of saving lives on the road, regardless of the impact it has on motorists. Some of them include:

• All cars to be fitted with 1-metre thick foam rubber bumpers.
• All cars to have a man with a flag and loudhailer walking in front of them to alert pedestrians of the imminent appearance of a motor vehicle.
• Abolish cars, everyone to travel by moonhopper.
• All vehicles to be painted violent pink for improved visibility.
• Data loggers for every vehicle with instant tolls and fines, combined with implants on people to catch the cyclists and skateboarders on any decent hill
• Abolish roads
• A “Working for Families Ferrari tax credit”
• Mandatory roller derby style body armour for all children
• Allow only one person per car so there is no distracting chatter
• A ban on Prime Ministerial motorcades
• Stop running trains on any tracks which cross roads by means of level-crossings
• Make all roads one way.

All of these excellent proposals will clearly significantly reduce the road toll, and hence are “worth doing”. I look forward to seeing them in Labour’s 2011 manifesto.

Isn’t it great that NATO reports are placed on Wikileaks now, so the NZ Minister of Defence can get fuller details of what NZ Forces in Afghanistan have been doing.

Maybe we should dispense with formal reports, and just have the Ministy of Defence supply an RSS feed to the Minister 🙂

We arrived at around 9 am and knew room would not be available until the afternoon, so we had pre-booked tickets to do a cruise on the Thames and then the London Eye. Been here a few times before but never got around to doing the eye.

The Palace of Westminster, from the Thames. I love how high they manage to fly the Union Jack.

Salient obviously gets too much funding from VUWSA if they can afford their own boat.

The world famous Globe Theatre.

The HMS Belfast.

My favourite bridge – Tower Bridge.

This is the office for London Mayor Boris Johnson. Very cool. Beats the Wellington Town Hall.

I like the contrast with the ancient Tower of London in the foreground and that giant dildo shaped building in the background, commonly known as the gherkin.

Then after the cruise it was up the eye. Each pod is pretty spacious.

Buckingham Palace in the distance, taken with 12x zoom.

London stretching off into the distance.

The queues for the Eye were pretty long, but they are actually quite fast moving and in the end spent less than 20 minutes waiting to load. Definitely worth doing once.

I’d definitely attend this if I was in Wellington. I encourage those interested in this issue to go along and hear the debate and have their say also:

Responsible Drinking: Who’s Responsible?

Responding to the Law Commission’s paper
Alcohol in our Lives: Curbing the Harm

Trinity Group invites you to attend a public forum to discuss the Law Commission’s recommended alcohol reforms
Trinity is a specialist hospitality company based in Wellington. It owns and operates bars, restaurants, bottle stores, and hotels and motels in the lower half of the North Island.

Trinity Group wants the government to:
• Retain the current alcohol purchase age at 18, and to establish a drinking age of 18 years old
• Encourage people to take personal responsibility for their drinking, and to
• Encourage people to drink more in regulated environments, such as bars.

Featuring the Hon Peter Dunne, United Future Leader and Associate Minister of Health and Gerard Vaughan, CEO, Alcohol Advisory Council of NZ

Chaired by Jeremy Smith, Managing Director, Trinity Group

6-7pm, Tuesday 27 July 2010
at the St Johns Bar, 5 Cable Street, Wellington
We will be serving complimentary nibbles and non-alcoholic drinks

www.trinitygroup.co.nz

Good on Trinity for arranging a forum, with balanced speakers. I find it interesting that they promote a drinking age, as well as a purchase age. This is where I tend to be also.

Vodafone has (for now) a data roaming rate of $2/MB when in Australia. On both of my recent trips to Aussie, I have kept my data on when roaming, as I decided a cost of $2/MB was affordable. So Vodafone got to make money from my roaming.

In Hong Kong and the UK, the roaming costs $10/MB. This is better than the old rates of $30/MB but still just too expensive. So what I have done is turned of data when roaming, and instead connect to wireless networks when I can find them.

This means that Vodafone makes no money at all from my roaming.

I’m overseas for a month. I could easily do 5 MB/day which at $2 would be $10 a day or $300 for the month. I wouldn’t be happy paying $300 for a month of overseas data roaming, but I would do so.

However no way would I pay $1,500 at $10/MB let alone $4,500 at the old $30/MB plan.

So if the telcos (Vodafone NZ can’t do it unilaterally) can get the price of data roaming down to semi-reasonable levels, I think they would be surprised by how much more people would use data overseas.

Kiwiblog is seven years old today. Over those seven years, there have been approx:

• 17,000 posts
• 600,000 comments
• 3,300 tags
• 5,700 registered commenters

Monitoring visits is more difficult as have swapped systems often. But over just the last two years, Kiwiblog has had:

• 12 million page views
• 5.5 million visits
• 1.9 million visits through Google

Thanks to all the readers who enjoy Kiwiblog – I enjoy writing it.

Labour’s Darien Fenton has said:

“Labour would support the lowering of the alcohol limit, because anything that will save lives on our roads is worth doing,” says Ms Fenton.

So we know what to look forward to if Labour get elected. Labour have said they will support anything that will save lives. Therefore I expect we will see:

• A maximum speed limit of 30 km/hr. This will save hundreds of lives.
• All cars to be fitted with technology which restricts speed to 30 km/hr
• A doubling of petrol tax as pushing poor people off the roads will mean less traffic crashes.
• A zero blood alcohol limit for all motorists
• Carless Days, like under Muldoon, This should reduce the road toll by one seventh.
• An offence to eat or drink while driving, as this can cause distractions
• An offence to change the radio station while driving

What other policies can you think of for Labour, with their declaration that anything that will save lives on our roads is worth doing?

I like this aggressive little piece of comparative advertising, comparing the performance of two iPads – one on Telecom’s XT and one on Vodafone.

Basically XT kicks butt in the more rural locations, but also is faster even parked outside Vodafone’s HQ. It’s a smart wee video.

Now what I’d like to know is if other people can get the same results, as shown in the video. The speedtests should be easy to replicate.

Stuff has a nice little feature of 35 streaking incidents.

Sadly 90% are of blokes, but still a fun collection of photos.

The one above is my favourite. I like how the photographer got the timing just right so the running leg blocked the genitals. I also love the look on the faces of is three pursuers. I’m not sure if they are going to catch him.

Most of all I love how the streaker looks very similar to my mate Chris Simpson. I never knew he liked cricket so much.

The Herald reports:

The Government has decided not to lower the blood-alcohol limit for drink driving for the moment.

It had been considering lowering the legal blood-alcohol limit from from 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood to 50 milligrams. But Transport Minister Steven Joyce said today that the Government will first do some New Zealand-specific research on the level of risk posed by drivers with a blood alcohol limit between 0.05 and 0.08.

I am so pleased about this. I am not 100% opposed to a reduction in the BAC limit, but have strongly submitted that there was not enough research to justify a change.

I have previously blogged at how there was only one driver aged over 25 killed in a road accident who had a BAC between 0.05 and 0.08. What we don’t know is how many people do actually drive with a BAC between 0.05 and 0.08, and hence what the cost of a law change would be measured against the benefits.

The Government has also announced:

• A zero drink drive limit for recidivist drink drivers.
• A zero drink drive limit for drivers under 20 years of age.
• Much tougher penalties for serious offences causing death and drink driving causing death.
• The introduction of alcohol interlocks for repeat drink-drivers.

The zero limit for recidivist drink drivers is a very good idea, as are the alcohol interlocks. Far better to prevent an accident, than punish someone afterwards with sensible targeting of recidivist offenders.

I’m pleased to see the Government exercise independent judgement on this issue, and not just do everything that the (taxpayer funded) lobby groups demand.

My mum’s phone is not working in London, and my guess was it was not set to roam. E-mailed Vodafone asking if they could do it, and had an e-mail response back in five minutes and a phone call within 30 minutes, and then all fixed.

Makes a wonderful change from some companies. The worst customer service I have had recently the other way was a travel website where you had to phone them in Singapore to change a booking, and you spend around 40 minutes on hold – paying international call rates the whole way. Grrrr.

What are you good and bad customer service experiences?

The flight out of Hong Kong was at 11 pm Saturday night, so spent the afternoon looking around Hong Kong Island itself. This is a view from Victoria Peak.

Another view from Victoria Peak. It was nice to actually get into some of the non-urban parts of Hong Kong.

This photo I took down near the Aberdeen Fishing Village. The bamboo was massive compared to what you see in NZ. Those shoots were thicker than my arm and went up scores of feet.

This is down at Stanley Bay, which is home to the popular Stanley Market. The drive over here alone makes it worthwhile.

As every Council Mayor and CEO is having their credit card expenses OIAed, I am getting the feeling that the media seem to think a story must be written, even if nothing newsworthy. Take the Wgtn City Council CEO:

Wellington ratepayers have funded the drinks tab for Air New Zealand executives, motivational books and luxury accommodation – including a council boss’s two-night hotel bill of nearly $1200.

Wellington City Council chief executive Garry Poole – who was not available for comment as the council does “not think it’s necessary for him to actually have to defend such minor spending” – racked up $5940 in two years from July 2008 on his “purchase card”.

That’s an average of $250 a month.

Mr Poole’s two-night $1192.68 accommodation plus expenses tab was for The Heathman Hotel, in Portland, Oregon, described as luxury accommodation and named as one of the top 500 hotels in the world, by Travel + Leisure magazine.

Council spokesman Richard MacLean said US$250 a night was an acceptable amount to pay for accommodation, and was hampered by a “grotesque” exchange rate at the time.

“We do not expect our chief executive to stay in a backpackers in a rural suburb of Portland.”

US$250 a night is not an unreasonable tariff. I have stayed in US hotels that cost way more than that. Now sure, I paid my own way, but the point is that many US hotels costs this much.

The Herald reports:

A teenager miraculously survived with minor injuries after falling 16 storeys from his family’s Manukau City apartment through a carpark roof on to a concrete floor.

The 15-year-old was in a stable condition in Middlemore Hospital last night, three days after the 40m- to 50m-plunge from the top floor of the Proximity Apartments in Amersham Way, near the Westfield Manukau mall.

He is believed to have suffered only a broken wrist, a broken rib, a gouged leg and internal injuries. Medical experts are amazed he was not killed.

I’ve just tried to work out what speed you are probably at, after 40 metres – but my physics is too rusty so I have failed.

Suffice to say fast enough, to be very lucky to be alive.

AP reports:

New estimates from the White House on Friday predict the budget deficit will reach a record $1.47 trillion this year. The government is borrowing 41 cents of every dollar it spends.

That’s just madness. People are focused on Europe crashing, but I am equally focused on the US crashing again.

Thanks God the situation in NZ is not this dire. Remember the US situation when certain politicians call for more spending.

The Governor-General is our effective head of state, and we will get a new one announced around April 2011, to take office from August 2011.

Sadly our current constitutional arrangements means that the Governor-General is chosen solely by the Prime Minister. The decision isn’t even ratified by Cabinet, let alone Parliament. The PM can also effectively sack the Governor-General.

The Republican Movement is holding a mock nomination process for Governor-General, in anticipation of the day when more than one New Zealander will get to decide who the effective Head of State will be.

There is an information page here, and you can make your own nominations here.

I tend to favour former Judges, as they have generally been kept well away from partisan politics.