So. I mean to talk about stuff I’ve done since thesis completion, specifically some books, sounds and movies. But I shan’t for now. The lack of blogging can be blamed largely on my lack of computer access. Although I have a machine at work, it isn’t really the premium blogging location. My computer at home continues to suck arse. It has an AGP slot, and I know it works, because Daz’s crappy Intel AGP card works in it, but does my GeForce One work in it? No. OK, no problem, it might be too old, I’ll try a more modern one. I’ll try James' GeForce Four... No luck. Doesn’t work. Hmmmm? What the. So eventually Waz and I go get the GeForce Two that he had in the motherboard. And you’d think that would work. I mean it worked a few months back when Waz had it, but no. So I check, the AGP slot, and yes it still goes. So what the hell is going on. I mean really WTF.
So, I’m a big computer whiner. I did however buy a 200 GIG hard drive, and 'tis mighty. It is a 1000% increase from my last purchased hard drive, and there was much rejoicing. Well, there was some, although I’m not sure if any of my current computers will actually be able to "see" 200gigs.
What ever shall I do? I go to my third computer, and ask it to connect me to the net while the others slouch around on the floor and table of the living room. But for some reason it isn’t playing ball. It is playing thickie.
And we are not at home to Mr Cockup.
To those of you still reading, and not bored to doing work by a discussion of my computer complaints, I give you some socalled content.
Right.
I have never been in favour of changing the New Zealand flag. I have been strongly in the better the devil we know, than the devil we don't camp. Although, this doesn't necessarily imply that I think the current flag is the devil, or even some what bad.
I understand many (but not all) of the complaints people have with the current flag design, but the problem is that finding a replacement is very very difficult. Well, finding a good replacement is difficult.
All sorts of people come up with various different designs for a new flag, and frankly most of them suck.
The problem I think is two fold. On one hand you have to produce a flag that is acceptable to both Maori and to everyone else. And on the other you have to produce a flag that isn't ugly. For now, on the topic of a flag culturally acceptable to Maori I think all I'll say is that I don’t think that the current Maori flag will be acceptable to the non-Maori population. I could be wrong, I haven’t conducted polls, but that is my feeling.
Now on the topic of ugly, my main concern is not that we think that it is ugly now, but that we aren't looking back at our flag in twenty years time thinking it is as ugly as we currently think that 80’s music videos look. And I think this is a large problem. I've seen a number of flag prototypes that are all well and good in a almost always stylised fern kind of way, but I worry that they will be the hip new postmodern flag design that in the near future gives way to the horrible dated monstrosities that are the registry building. Or in fact almost any Uni building.
So what is my point? Well I was watching the end of the Triathalon on TV and I was watching the crowd of Kiwis, and boy was it all black. Which is not too surprising, we have a pretty good monopoly on black for our national colour (I think?) But I also noticed that nobody had a NZ flag, instead they had the giant Ferns with New Zealand along the bottom.
And... And... And for once my heart warmed slightly towards changing our flag. Not too much perhaps, but I did note that this was the first time I had had this thought. And so... Now you know.
Lucky you.
Hey, you and you, can you tell me what (if anything) you did to remove the suck that is ads on your blogs.
I thought it might be something to do with having a new style blogger template, necause he doesn't have one of them, and he still has crappy ads. But he has one of them (nothing else mind) and he still has crappy ads. So what is up with that.
And now I present: Some crap I wrote yesterday, whilst I sat on hold to the Paradise help desk....
Well, teh Internet is broken here at work, and therefore I can do nothing, just like the goggles. OK, I can do something, I can do this, and I can sit on hold for the Paradise help desk. Although if Emma's words are accurate, then their phones are probably broken. So, while I sit on hold and listen to bad bad easy listening crapola, I shall spout easy reading crapola.
Firstly, the snow. It is good, and it is pretty, and I'm glad I don't live somewhere where it snows a lot, for while it is good and pretty in small doses, it strikes me that it would suck a lot if it was outside more than just every so often. And walking to work in the snow was slower and more slippery than really necessary. It no doubt made for some great photo ops.
I miss my headset from ADT. I don't really need a headset, maybe just a better phone, because this phone is the impossible to hold on shoulder and type well, or comfortably phone. Icky. So, yes bring on headsets. I have now been on hold (with only one "we are sorry" message) for 16 mins. This song goes on and on. (But is not the song that never ends).
On the rugby. Now I'm not a rugby fan, I'm more of a "when we kick arse" fan. But it was still a bit sad to get smacked around by South Africa on the weekend. Sara, who is more rugby wise than me, made what seems an emminently sensible compaint. Something along the lines of:
A few games ago we were kicking arse and taking names. Then we tried this new flat backline bizzo and have stopped kicking arse, and in fact are being kicked. Yet we continue to use afore mentioned flat backline. Now while I don't have a problem with coaches trying new things. surely, when new things don't work, on a number of occassions, you think to yourself "hmm, that didn't work, and now we are not kicking arse, like we were justa few weeks ago. How about we stop doing what we are doing, and start winning again" or something.
Although this was put into my unique linguistic parlance. I agree with her.
OK, the helpdesk tells me it will fixed in an hour. Super. It took them 35 mins of hold to tell me that. RAD. What's more it is effecting ALL paradise customers. Lame, with a capital suck. Speaking of sucking, the Paradise helpdesk does not suck as much as the ticketek site does. I know, because I wanted to look up muse information, and it sucked at telling me what I needed to know. Sucked hard. Luckily, (noting my super segue styles), we can now mock ticketek, and its staff.
But you forget two important things.
1. You are not completely anonymous when you surf from work.
2. You are a complete idiot.
Right, it is back to the future time. And yet I am still on hold to Paradise. Even though it is the next day. Well, not actually still, in terms of "since then" more along the lines of still, in terms of extra commas, and again being on hold. This time, for something useful. Speciffically why something isn't working, wait, that is what I was doing yesterday. But anyway, the man just solved my problems, informing me that the client passwords had gotten out of sync with each other. Which does explain the problem, but also makes me go "BAH!" that took 40 mins of my life on hold to you people, and damnit it sucked.
Yes I could have sent them an email, but I sent them one last week asking the question, and they have not yet replied, and said client is becoming grumpy.
Right, now to the games, with the shooting and the geeking and the stuff.
Tomorrow, or more rightly, later, I will provide a review of some things. But not now. No. Oh, and on Friday I'm going to Dunedin on the Undie. Huzzah.
From metafilter:
Yesterday's really crappy movie is today's reality. Welcome to RePet.
posted by Krrrlson at 5:33 PM PST
I declare that silly. Also, I declare this to be a mighty mighty menu. (warning somewhat big arse pdf) We should try to get Libby to go there and order some of the things. My it is a menu of many things. Go look. (via Kottke)
Ahhh Fark. You are amusing. On the topic of King Arthur star Keira Knightley signs autographs in the nude. Rickythepenguin gives us:
How wouldst I hit it?
Like it slapped my grandma then kicked my dog.....that's how.
Thanks Ricky, thanks.
When not working for A man, I work for another A man. He is a builder and I am part time labourer scum. As previously discussed, SJS is awesome and working for builder man is good because it is pretty easy and mostly involves stealing Nic's car and driving around (sometimes) with Ben solving mysteries. Or knocking down ramps.
We go around to builder mans place at the ongodly hour of 0830-0900 and are given our list of things to do. Normally this is go somewhere, take something apart, take it somewhere else. Just the type of task to MA types are fully up for. Sometimes this is made more complicated by such things as "goto placemakers first and get some wood" and othertimes the place to go is further away than simply around town. Driving out to Rangiora for one, and Wednesday sees me heading to Cust (never heard of it actually).
Anywho, we are the ramp dismantlers. You got a ramp you don't need you call us. We take it away. There is another branch of the operation the almighty "Builders" that are responsible for actually building the ramps, but we don't like to talk about them.
What ramps I hear you say? Well if you are injured or temporarily disabled and need a ramp to get into your house then we are the men for the job. The DHB tells us where and what to do and we do it (OK the builders do it) but they require wood to build ramps and that is where my solo wood delivery missions come in, otherwise they recycle bits of old ramps, which is where Ben and my ramp relocation missions are handy.
Which is all good. The only downside is that often the type of people to be temporarily disabled are of the terminally ill cancer patient variety. That is, it seems (I could be wrong/not really know what I'm talking about) that sometimes if you are going home to die, you might need a ramp to get into or out of the house and we are the ramp providers.
Yay you might think, ramps for everyone and a good time had by all. Which is no doubt true the ramps are very useful. However, when TBALC forces arive to remove the ramp... the implication is death. Which is a suck. When we show up on your door to take the ramp away someone has died. We showed up the day after a funeral once and talked to the deceased's husband. Can't say that was too much fun.
I have also been dreading the day I would go to a house where I had delivered the ramp and was now to removie it. The situation there being I show up, time passes, someone dies, I return. Mmm negative.
So it was super to find out the last time we did a few hours work for the builder that not everyone who gets a ramp is terminal. We were rocking out in Linwood and when we came to dismantle the ramp we were met by the lady of the house who talked to us through the window about how good the ramp had been, but how now she didn't need it anymore as she could walk.
Woot.
Also, extensive ramp deconstruction has meant that I'm now master of the two crowbar ramp attack. Fear is the little death.
Conclusion: Hamish, call your parents!
The Story: So Dan called me up from London yesterday morning telling me all was good in the world except that he had just had a call from Bea(sp?) in Wellington. Bea had called Dan because Bea's aunty in London had just called her. Bea's aunty in London had called Bea in Wellington because the UK Police had called her. Or possibly visited her in force.
The police had called her / visited her in force because they think she might be one of those "kills people and buries the corpses in the back yard" types. And for all I know she is, but the specific alleged victim in this case is one C Montgomery Burns, err I mean Hamish.
Apprently Bea's aunts is the last known address of our estranged guitarist. Obviously they don't know about the Czech Connection, but I guess that's what free movement within the EU gets you.
According to Dan, Hamish's parents haven't heard from this year (I think that is what he said) yes, that's right, over seven months. So they have filed an International Missing Persons thingy on his arse. And probably the rest of him.
I imagine this wasn't helped by the death of his angelfire email account. His move to gmail whilst being good probably went unmentioned to his parents. I mean we only know about it from his blog, and I don't know that they know about his blog, in fact I'm pretty sure that they don't.
Evidence: Of course he could be dead. I don't know who saw him last, probably Dan when he left Prague, but we haven't seen him in person for some time, nor heard from him on the tel-e-phone. All we have are our millions of dollars, legions of fans, sporadic emails and occasional blogs. For example a few days ago we heard tell of darts.
I'm pretty confident that those emails and blog posts are indeed coming from Hamish, especially his emails that contain some of the madness that Hamish.
(The slave, the SLAVE!) But anyway, I guess even if he isn't dead he could still be locked up in a box somewhere.
In lieu of War Rocket Ajax, I have despatched Nic to contact Hamish's parents
So anyway, Hamish, call your mother. Fool.
Extra For Experts:
Dan has asked everyone to email hamish (emailhamish@gmail.com) with the subject line "Hamish you tool" in the hopes of getting some reaction out of him. Onwards.