someone forked out the $$$ to buzz piha with a plane carrying a banner today

NO CAFE BOB GO BLOODY NATIONAL

they did about four laps and few off north towards bethells (or more likely whenuapai)

so ...

• was this terse message intended for bobbie? or bob harvey?

• if it's really for just one person, why not save the dollars and, i dunno, paint it on the road, or get some stickers printed, or .... no wait, forget i said that.

• why "go national"? are you saying a national govt would put the cafe on hold? i got the impression national were a little bit more freemarket than that, since muldoon anyway

hey, it's election year, most candidates will promise you anything you ask for in exchange for a few votes.

fascinating ... i'd love to know how much it costs to get a plane to do a few laps of piha. and how many letters you get.

i would personally have been much more impressed if they'd scooted along the back of the breakers, or maybe done old fashioned skywriting.

is it better than a few more stickers? yeah, na.

i've been checking out google maps versus yahoo! maps, evaluating the best nz coverage

google gets cred for a hot flight sim built into google earth and for not lying to dutch tourists about opanuku road joining up with scenic drive. when dutch tourists are deceived, they end up breaking their rental cars on the bullbars of my clunkery old diesel, and that sux. -10000 points to some nz mapping providers for their mapping badness.

but today we're looking at yahoo!, who are predicting (note contrast between coastline in satellite pic and inlay) either severe global warming, or a catastrophic dambreak at the huia dam

what else have we learned from the mapping madness?

• yahoo has ok pics, but responds to requests for specific nz addresses with "do you mean waitakere, or waitakere?" then it sends you to waitakere township either way
• yahoo has lots of black areas across nz, and pretty much no street map ... maybe this whole yahoo!xtra thing will change that ... but would you trust xtra for directions to the corner store?
• any mapping provider gives better results than nz posts postcode finder, which still insists that piha doesn't exist, try paihia. i cannot find a single piha road that nz post know about. such a pity, given what a nice chap the postie is ...
• google maps are pretty damn good so far!

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Apparently the new postcode for Piha is 1232, if anyone feels like sending mail(snail).  Nova is particulary keen to recieve things addressed to her.

In a flash of inspiration, NZ Post decided to change the postcodes for a lot of new Zealand's mail delivery. And to solve the confusion, they installed a Very Flash Postcode Finder on their website.
According to NZ Post's website, Seaview Road, Piha ... does not exist. Or rather, it is not located in any of the following towns or cities:

• Piha
• Auckland
• Waitakere

Searching the very high-tech but not very accurate NZ Post PostCode Finder in order to get a correct address for your mail results in this:

If you think you live in the cities of Auckland or Waitakere, you're sadly mistaken:

Luckily for them, Brad - our marvellous postman - refuses to acknowledge their denial of our existence. We still get our mail.

Update: NZ Post only recognise this address if I state it as being in New Lynn, 30km away.

If I give it correctly, stating the name of the actual town, NZ Post gets it wrong by 272km.

discovered this completely delicious panoramic pic of piha from lion rock yesterday, which is probably WAY too big to download ... but what*eva ... so if you click it, you'll get a window that you can pan around in ...

its from wikimedia commons and shot by gadfium (thanks mister! drop us a line when you next swing by!)

ps. you might need to click the magnifying glassies to zoom in and pan around, my browser scales the image to fit my window by default