I’ve never understood why some people consider their voting choices a matter of national security, so when via Andrew McMillan, I saw a good rationale for why you should share your opinion I found my excuse to write this post.

Party Vote
I’ll be voting for National. I’m philosophically much closer to National than Labour, particularly on economic and personal responsibility issues, but even if I wasn’t the thought of having Phil Goff as Prime Minister would be enough to put me off voting Labour. His early career seems strong, but lately it’s been one misstep and half-truth after another, the remainder of the Labour caucus and their likely support partners don’t offer much reassurance either. If I was left-leaning and the mess that Labour is in wasn’t enough to push me over to National this year then I’d vote Greens and hope they saw the light and decided to partner with National.

Electorate Vote
I live in Dublin, but you stay registered in the last electorate where you resided, which for me is Tamaki. I have no idea who the candidates there are, so I’ll just be voting for the National candidate for the reasons above.

MMP Referendum
I have no real objections to MMP and I think it’s done a good job of increasing representation in our parliament. I like that parties can bring in some star players without them having to spend time in an electorate. I don’t like the tendency towards unstable coalitions that our past MMP results have sometimes provided.

Of the alternatives, STV is the only one that I think should be seriously considered, FPP and it’s close cousin SM don’t give the proportionality of MMP and PV just seems like a simplified version of STV with limited other benefit. If you’re going to do preferential voting, you might as well do it properly and use STV.

So, I’ll vote for a change to STV, not because I’m convinced that MMP is wrong, but because I think it doesn’t hurt for the country to spend a bit more time and energy confirming that we have the right electoral system. If the referendum succeeds and we get another referendum between MMP and something other than STV in 2014, I’ll vote to keep MMP. If we have a vote between MMP and STV in 2014 I’m not yet sure how I’d vote. STV is arguably an excellent system, but I worry that it’s too complex for most voters to understand.

PS. Just found this handy list of 10 positive reasons to vote for National, if you’re still undecided and need a further nudge. Kiwiblog: 10 positive reasons to vote National

My Political Views
I am a center-right moderate social libertarian
Right: 1.33, Libertarian: 1.97

Political Spectrum Quiz

I completed the quiz pretty quickly and felt the need to answer ‘it depends on the specifics’ to many of the questions, so take the results with a grain of salt. I think it is a reasonably accurate description of me though.

• Auckland – January and February
• Dublin – February, photos
• Hamilton – March
• Miri – April, photos
• Sarikei – April, photos
• Kuching – April, photos
• Kota Kinabalu – April, photos
• Singapore – April, photos
• Dubai – April
• London – April, photos
• Dublin – May onwards, photos
• Galway – June
• Cork – June, photos
• New York – July, photos
• Cambridge – July, photos
• Belfast – August, photos
• Luxembourg – September, photos
• Paris – November, photos
• Whistler – November, photos
• San Francisco – November/December, photos
• Bratislava – December, photos
• Bad Gastein – December, photos
• Salzburg – December, photos
• Vienna – December, photos

18 cities, 5 towns/villages and a total of approximately 101,216km travelled in the air!

Back in January, Kat and I decided that it was about time we put thoughts into action, and booked some one-way plane tickets to get ourselves to Europe. Our plan is to spend at least a couple of years (more if I have my way) exploring the other side of the world and generally broadening our horizons.

We leave NZ on the 31st of March flying on Emirates to Singapore. We plan to spend a couple of weeks in Malaysia visiting some of Kat’s extended family (who I’ve never met), followed by 3 nights in Singapore, a night in Dubai, finally ending up in London at Heathrow Airport on the 17th of April.

Soon after we booked the flights I started applying for Jobs in Europe, as the prospect of converting NZD to EUR or GBP to live on is not at all attractive. I was immediately rejected by the first place I applied to (Data Connection) because I didn’t have straight A-grades in high school! (The recruiter said they didn’t even bother to look at my University Degree!). Luckily that wasn’t the only job that I had applied for!

A day or two after hearing back from Data Connection, I received a call from one of the Google recruiters in Dublin, following up on the CV that I’d sent through via their website a week or two earlier. The rest, as they say, is history. I had a couple of phone interviews, followed by a whistle stop trip to Dublin (photos here) for 4 hours of onsite interviews, a week or two of waiting and finally an offer.

I’ve just accepted the offer, and sometime after the 17th of April, I’ll be starting as a Linux/Unix Systems Administrator for Google in Dublin, Ireland! Moving to Dublin to work for Google seems to be somewhat of a trend these days, and I’m looking forward to catching up with all the other Debian people who have recently posted similar news.

The realities of shifting across the world in less than a month are starting to sink in now! We left our apartment this weekend just gone, and we’re staying with my parents for a few weeks while we get all our household stuff into storage and sort out what we’re taking to Dublin with us. It’s a big job packing up a house and it’s scary looking at the amount of stuff we’ve accumulated over just two short years! Luckily we have some exciting opportunities to look forward and keep us motivated!

One of my Christmas presents was a brand spanking new USB key. For quite a while I’d been planning to put my SSH / GPG keys off onto something like this for some extra security.

I’ll write up the exact steps of how I achieved my setup in the sometime next week, but it was all fairly easy.

As part of the transition I followed Adrian von Bidder’s guide to multiple subkeys such that I have now a signing key (0x4054AB08) which I keep separately from the private key material of my primary key. My new key fingerprint is below

pub 1024D/59B2D9A0 2005-02-03
Key fingerprint = 6583 A11F 1428 FCDD 65FC C7B5 E0CD 3CDC 59B2 D9A0
uid Matthew G L Brown (Default Key)
uid Matt Brown (Debian Packages)
uid Matt Brown (WLUG Key)
uid Matt Brown (CRCnet Key)
uid [jpeg image of size 4390]
uid Matt Brown (MediaLab Key)
sub 1024g/DF8A0504 2005-02-03
sub 1024D/4054AB08 2006-01-04 [expires: 2008-01-04]

I’ve uploaded the new key to the keyservers, or you can grab it from my key information page.

All in all I’m quite liking the new setup, plug usb key in, password dialog pops up for SSH key, enter password, password dialog pops up for GPG signing key, enter password. I then have both keys stored in the relevant agents easily accessible for signing email / logging into machines. Meanwhile my GPG private key is sitting securely somewhere else. I plan to sign all outgoing email from now on.

Next step is to investigate libpam-ssh for local authentication so that I don’t have to type 3 passwords whenever I login.

Moving House
We’re moving house tommorrow, this means that my DSL connection will be down for a few days while Telecom and my ISP get everything sorted out. Hopefully it will go smoothly and I’ll be back online sometime mid next week.