Some of our readers have notified us that there are issues accessing parts of this website. Our apologies - we were attempting to upgrade the Organic Groups module, which wreaked havoc with the access permission settings and blocked members and non-members. Another attempted fix last night didn't go to plan and caused the website to die entirely.

Luckily we keep a permanent "near-line" back up of this website, and thanks to the guys at Net24, we're back online. However everything in the 24 hours previous to the Organic Groups module upgrade was lost - so if you posted a comment here, we apologise that it hasn't been able to be restored.

We've opened comments up to all comers - registration to comment is not required. There's a spam filter on, and we can ban anyone who breaks our terms of use.

Some good blog coverage of the opening of nominations for the President of New Zealand. 

Greg at Gman inc (copied on Silent Running):

The History of Republicanism in New Zealand page has now been updated to include the gradual changes to the Governor-General's office to become the "virtual presidency" we have today. For example:

The graph below was produced using the all surveys (that is, excluding the internet polls and phone-in surveys) on the Republican Movement's polling page, going back to 1989. The trend line is a five-point moving average.

2 June 2008 is New Zealand's official public holiday to celebrate the Queen's Birthday.

However, the Republican Movement can find no actual celebrations of the Queen's reign in New Zealand. If you know of any, please contact us or comment below. There are, however, plenty of celebrations for Matariki, the Maori new year which starts on 5 June and ends 5 July. The Auckland City Council, for example, has no celebrations for Queen's Birthday, but a month long festival for Matariki.

Meanwhile, 2008 will be the last time the British colony of Bermuda celebrates the Queen's Birthday. New Zealand should follow suit - more and more of us celebrate Matariki instead.

Well, that was strange. Something knocked out the server last night (or perhaps the hosting) for this website, and everything was deleted. How strange. However, we're back online, albeit with an older copy (all updates from Monday were lost, sorry). Time to restore was less than an hour, so that's a good turn around time.