Dreamy government rambling

Ah wow, I didn't get to say Happy Birthday to Li Jun. I'll say it here in case Li Jun reads this some time in the future: "Happy Birthday Li Jun. Haven't seen you since last year!" Anyways, you're right, you have to wonder what is going on with the poor radiologists' salaries... we don't need more offices in New Zealand. Gotta be careful in case some of the radiologists get fed up and move to Australia. If our luck is bad, we might one day have to fly over to Australia to see a qualified radiologist. But it wouldn't be too bad because we would have enough managers to manage all our flight and accomodation bookings. Perhaps we could sneak in a trip to Dream World while we're there. But no, I think they should just make me prime minister and then I'd make sure the radiologists got a fair pay rise. And I would also solve all of New Zealand's other problems as well... And implement world peace by making lots of nuclear weapons and then telling everyone to play nice otherwise I'll blow the whole planet up. Just kidding; I would only hire suicide bombers to blow up Al Queda.

Happy Birthday

Today is Lijun's birthday. I hope you had fun with Angel and YaoYao (I think that's it) in China.

Let the cancer patients die while the Health Ministry sit in their new offices

Cancer patients have been going without treatment as the New Zealand ministry of health refuses to pay $150k all up for radiologists to get a pay rise, and instead spends $6m on new offices for the Health Ministry bureaucracy. Meanwhile the NZ government has billions of dollars in tax surplus.

I think that's quite shocking, but then most things that governments to anywhere are shocking, so whatever. But I don't see how refusing to give pay rises to radiologists and buying new offices for the bureaucracy is going to help anyone get healthier. In fact, I don't see how having a bureaucracy at all is going to help doctors diagnose and treat patients any better at all.

The government should be providing services to the population such as law, education and health, but it certainly shouldn't be paying people to boss each other around, and hire more managers to tell the other managers what to do, or hire so many people for those purposes that it needs to buy new buildings for them.

Oh well, its bound to happen anyway.

A new game

There is a new game coming (hopefully) this year. It is called Spore. I want it. Please. Now.

In the game, you start as a microbe, in a 2D playing field, globbing (that's a new word from me) around eating smaller microbes, and escaping the evil bigger microbes. You get 'evolution points' for eating other microbes and eventually you get to lay an egg. When the egg is laid, you can use evolution points to add aspects such as a spike (to defend against those evil bigger microbes) or some form of propulsion, whatever. Eventually you get too big to be a microbe any more, and you evolve onto a higher plane of existence. The 3D realm.

In the 3D realm you are now a creature. No more evil microbes trying to eat you (I don't think they have diseases in the game). However, there are other bigger, meaner creatures out to get you, so you have continue running around eating smaller creatures. Once again you can continue evolving, with flippers and other attack/defence mechanisms. However you now need to find a mate before you can get the eggs laid. (You have to get laid to have eggs laid).

Eventually you get into tribal mode, to city mode, to planet mode, and eventually after conquering the planet (through either warlike or diplomatic means) you can build UFOs, and have interstellar wars instead.

Along the way (from tribal to global dominance) the behaviour of your creatures will be defined by the way you grew them up. To put it clumsily.

Look it up on Wikipedia, and check out the videos on YouTube.

Now

as you can see