Central Auckland, part 3

Sorry for the ultra long delay. I only got broadband speeds back on tuesday, but this was assessment week, so i was snowballed with a ton of work. I felt sick and I think I got a bit of food poisoning on Thursday, and now I'm a bit sick! But rejoyce! For the weekend is here!

Anyway, pics:


This, my friends, is the sky tower. From the base, this is how it looks like. At 328m above ground, its VERY tall! It looks quite nice from far, but at the base, all you can see is just concrete, more cold concrete and steel.


I was lucky enough to see someone jump off the skytower. Dont worrk, its a common thing. At a rate of, maybe 10 people jumping off the tower everyday. :P

Seriously through, its real. People are mad enough to pay to jump from the top of the tower and live to tell the experience. Its controled through, so the string by the sides makes sure you fall at a straight line. With the pecutan at 9.8ms/s, it takes just under 12 seconds to fall from the top to the bottom. I know, coz I timed it. :)


A self potrait of me before entering the base of the sky tower. I must admit it came out quite good, randomly hitting the shutter like that.



Its not cheap folks, to enter. There are a few prices, all depending on how high are you prepared to go. Even with a student card, which I did not have at that time, its a whopping $15 (RM 39) just to get to main obversation deck. Needless to say, I passed on. My wallet was crying just looking at the prices.


So I chose the next best thing: taking a pic with the tower! Well, a replica of it at least. This was taken with the help of a middle aged Korean tourist, which had a bit of trouble using a digital camera. Still, I it came out fine.

What is missing from these pictures is the casino! They stopped me from taking a picture of even outside the casino, which is public to all. I could walk around, but obvously not enter (minimum 20 years old earning 7 digit salarys first). Dunno why the dont allow me to takes pic of even outside of the casino; do I look like someone who's taking pics to plan my big casino robbery?

But really, there is nothing much in the skycity. Its just a posh, high class restaurant, the casino, a 5 star hotel and the Tower itself. If you dont have money, you can only look around. I was finished with it in 15 mins!

Part 4 coming up! Oh, and there is a part 5 in the works. There is too many things to see in central Auckland.

The thing is through, my mainland chinese friends find Auckland boring! Well, coming from a 17 mil population city (shanghai) and 15 mil population city (beijing) makes Auckland (1.5 mil) like a kampung. But for a guy from the cat city( 0.5 mil), Auckland is like a first class KL, with amazing, free, clean public toilets, VERY realible bus service, Auckland is like a dream come true.

Another thing: NEVER TRUST MAINLAND CHINESE!

Woot! Broadband speeds back!

And the SPM results are out! Mina-san (Everybody), what did you all get? Shout out in the box!

Ladies and gentlemen, plus class of 5C/B/A-2005, ninghua is back in buisness! Let the SPM results roll! This blog is now back in buisness!

Tsubasa fans are saved!

Quickie update: Shinsen subs has done tsubasa the movie! So the western fansub groups are not THAT spineless after all......

Click here for the tracker. The torrent is at the bottom of the page. Or keep an eye out at anidb. Ignore Saiyaman; its a RAW( no subs) provider.

Heres a pic from that movie, from the chinese fansub groups:



Still busy and on a dial up; dying to continue my log about Central Auckland.

PROTEST!!!

I may be in NZ, but with the Net, I'm as close to the action as the next person in malaysia. Well, almost.

With the hike of 30 sen/liter in petrol, the people have finally woken up to the fact that the Malaysian gov is killing the people. So I saw this on Malaysiakini:

Heavy police presence at fuel hike demo

Mar 3, 06 2:24pm

Even before today's demonstration against the fuel price hike - which is due to kick off at 2.30pm - hundreds of police officers could be seen milling around the venue and the surrounding areas of the iconic Kuala Lumpur City Centre.

About 100 police officers backed by another 100 men from the Federal Reserve Unit (FRU) have taken positions under the shadow of the Petronas Twin Towers.

Two water cannon trucks have also been deployed and five police trucks are on stand-by should there be mass arrests of the protestors.

The demonstration - organised by a number of NGOs and opposition political parties - is to protest the hefty increase of fuel prices by 18.5 percent to 23 percent, the sharpest hike in history.

In less than two years, the cost of petrol has gone up by 40 percent while diesel now cost 102 percent more.

Read here for context. Jeff is back after a 72 hr absence!

I just got word, from a contact seems to work near the KLCC towers, where the planned protest is. Looks small. I am blogging this at 3.44 PM MYT, so the protests would have been more of less over by the time this is posted up.

Heres the pics I got. Its taken from a camera phone, so quality isnt that clear. I do not own, or take the pictures. All rights to the owner of the picture.





Doesnt look very big. Estimates at the lowyat forum put it at 1000 or so. I have more school mates than that!


A helicopter! Good grief! Is it a press one or from the police force? It looks blue in colour, so it might be the police.


The dark black spots seem to be the trees on the roads green belt. The crowd seems to be quite scatterd. There is no clear sign of police presence in this picture. I have a feeling that this pic is taken from the Twin Towers it self! The photographer is ABOVE the helicopter!

The full picture will be clearer when the news breaks tommorow. I have no access to any Malaysian sources, so any info would be more than welcome!

As usual, the weak government is too scared of protests. And the people are still too letargic to even support these protests. Just look at lowyat forumers. With attitudes like these, its amazing that people still put up with a government that bleeds the people dry.

I'm not talking about petrol subsidies, which cause more harm. I'm talking about AP's, corruption, and stiffling speech. Whats the point of being able to make money when all the money goes to the gov?

How, to use this site

http://ninghua.blogspot.com/2006/01/how-to-use-this-site.html

I did make a guide back in Jan, but it seems that no one bothered to read it. No one seems to be aware there is a shoutbox, or that you can leave your comments in my individual posts!

Come on people! I kenw so many people in Kuching. Surely you guys could at least say hi in the shoutbox?

First 773km/h, now 956km/h?

I dont trust our Malaysian Policemen. Allegations of corruption, abuse and squategate aside, they have been known to issue weird summons. Still, they are a good laugh at. Espically for me frozen here in NZ, I dun mind the humor.

5 years ago, Malaysian policemen booked Mr New for going at 773km/h. Click for more infomation. Now, the police men have struck again, this time with a summon for 956km/h!

The NST article is here. And to preserve it, I've made a copy here:

Kancil doing 956kph?

KANGAR, Wed. NST 02 March 2006

---

Imagine a Perodua Kancil travelling at the speed of an aeroplane.

That’s what the traffic policemen are insisting that labourer Kamarul Khairi Kasin, 22, had done when they issued him with a summons for speeding along the North-South Expressway at 956km per hour.

He received the summons through the post from the Muar police station.

"I can’t imagine driving at that kind of speed.

"Besides, I have never driven to Johor in my life so how is it that I have a speeding ticket from there.

"The furthest I have driven is Sungai Petani," said Kamarul of Kampung Balik Bukit, Chuping.

The summons stated he committed the offence at Km173 of the highway on Jan 25.

Kamarul took the day off from his work to sort out the traffic offence at the Kangar traffic police station but was advised to make an appeal to the Muar police station.

First they made poor Mr New go more that half the sound of speed. Now there saying Mr Kamarul is going at the speed of a jet plane!

I have no idea how this happened, but surely, our policemen have the sense to see that any traffic offence at this speed is a SERIOUS mistake? The fastest I've seen a kancil go is 130km/h. For a 660cc and 850cc car, thats amazing.

Shumacer or Alonso, for all their speed, never go no faster than 35okm/h in the race tracks. Just to give an idea how crazy that speed is.....

Besides, how did this happen? There is something SERIOUSLY wrong with out Malaysian speed cameras.................

SUSPENDED

scared you guys did I?

Well, its not much of a joke that I can no longer update my blog until the middle of this month. So I have to issue my appologies. All further updates of this blog will be mostly text, and limited to semi-important issues.

The reason is time and bandwith. Both of which I dont have much control over. I have A TON of stuff to blog about thats backlogged in my drafts, but I cannot do them.

And school takes no1 pirority over anything else. I came here to study, and I'm jolly well going to do that with all my strength. There are tons of interesting things in NZ, and even more things online to blog about. But I fear that this may not be possible. Work has to be done first.

So time is a constraint. And it can get tiring blogging when all i want is to plop down on my bed at the end of a tiring and hetic day.

And the biggest obsticle is BANDWITH. I do not have broadband speeds anymore. not until the end of this month.

WARNING:ANTI-TELECOM NZ RANT AHEAD

The thing about "broadband" (BB) here, is there are data limits imposed on each line. The biggest data cap here is 20GB given by telecom. (telecom here refers to telecom NZ, not telekom malaysia). I am on a 10 GB cap.

Sounds like a lot? well... no. No1, the 10 GB cap includes your UPLOAD bandwith! So everytime I email, skype, MSN, update this blog, I'm contributing to the 10GB limit! As you can see in my image heavy posts of Downtown Auckland, that ammount of images I uploaded was alot. 3MB in fact! Plus my uploading of files to people, it all added up!

And I'm sharing this connection with 3 people. So 10/3 gives me 3.33GB of data/month, including upload! Thats hardly anything, and with a 1 Mbit connection, can easily hit it in less than a month! I admit, I was quite busy dloading stuff, but it was coz I wanted to get BT to work. And no, they still bloody block BT here! Yet, we still managed to hit the damn limit!

And what happens when we hit it? We go back to 56k speeds! YES! I'm now sharing a 56k connection with THREE PEOPLE! Imagine the horror! Skype on a 56K aint that great, imagine 2 people on skype at the same time!

So we have made some adjustments, meaning that I wouldnt get on when others have to use it. But even if I'm on alone, the speeds are SLOW! ArAAAAARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Moral of the story: No matter how bad/slow/terrible TMNET is, at least u guys have true unlimited BB there! Here there are NO unlimited plans. And even if there are (supposedly) 3 BB players here, they charge almost the same thing, so not much point. No body gives a bigger data cap for the same price of less!

The data counter is reset on the 15th of every month. So its slow speeds until the middle of the month.

I miss TMNET.........................................................................