Posts by Nat Torkington

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  • Busytown: Oh, Gee,

    Now I regret chopping out the paragraph where I mused on the link between the psychic appeal of hoodies and the phenomenon of (male) circumcision. (I don't think it works in NZ, anyway?)

    Don't forget to make the inevitable "dickhead" joke.

    Ti Point • Since Nov 2006 • 100 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: Too Good to Be True,

    I'm reminded of this Economist article about success in the war on methamphetamine. "The drug is disappearing. In 2001 no fewer than 589 methamphetamine labs and dump sites were discovered in Pierce county. Last year just 76 were."

    How? Not testing. By cracking down on precursors to home manufacture, it became an imported drug and thus costs rose. In concert with education and marketing ("meth-mouth" discouraged teens from taking it), use of meth dropped. Users went from meth to crack cocaine which, despite the bad rep, isn't as bad as meth (and didn't involve fire hazards on the order of meth manufacture).

    It's a fascinating article and easily repays the few minutes it takes to read. However, I don't think either party wants to hear what it says.

    Ti Point • Since Nov 2006 • 100 posts Report Reply

  • Busytown: Oh, Gee,

    I can't hear "It's what's under the hood that counts" without thinking "clitoral".

    I need to get out more.

    Ti Point • Since Nov 2006 • 100 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: How many children with cancer…,

    "Otherwise, wouldn't Foo Camps be conducted online?"

    Well, I'll leave that up to the Foo Campers. But when I was a regular attendee at National Party conferences, there's sure no substitute for F2F interfacing when it comes to gossip, intrigue and self-inflicted alcohol poisoning. (There was also the practicalities of holding various elections on the conference floor.) Getting substantive business done? Holding regional Young Nat executive meeting via tele-conference (with agendas and supporting documentation distributed via e-mail) worked fine.

    (waves hand) Hi, Foo Camper here. Kiwi Foo is an "unconference". There's no agenda, we don't have deliverables, and anyone caught drafting a mission statement is killed first in the next round of Werewolf. Foo is fun, which teleconferences very definitely are not.

    Foo Camps build trust and share information in an extremely informal way. Foo is not a format for achieving consensus or grinding out documents or action plans. I try hard to select the guest list to minimize gossip and intrigue and maximize nerd value. Self-inflicted alcohol poisoning, however, comes with any group with the possible exception of the Temperance Union (though I suspect they're massive P-heads or love group sex with farmyard animals). It's how many New Zealanders gain the confidence to socialize (drinking, I mean, not group sex with animals).

    I think Foo Camps are substantive business. Not the daily workhorse keep-the-engine-of-industry-going invoicing, programming, managing type of business. But trust makes business easier and knowledge makes it more efficient.

    I refuse to have an opinion about the HNZC meeting. It could have been waste. It could have been productive. To figure out which, you'd need to know the wider brief of the meeting (did those people need to be there, was the subject matter weighty and thorny enough to justify face-to-face rather than teleconference) and the outcomes (did they successfully tackle their problems). After just a week it'd be hard to say whether the outcomes are successful, so I say we lack the information to judge. What I don't like about the Herald piece (and a lot of recent Herald stories) is that it appears to have prejudged--Dot's response was never going to answer whether the meeting was productive.

    And, more importantly, the Herald seems uninterested in the bigger picture. If there is widespread waste at HNZC, we need to know! Reporting whether it makes a profit or loss would put the meeting into context. Asking for the last two years of off-site meetings to figure out frequency, cost, and purpose (are we really meeting every year to play with our mission statements?) would put the meeting into context. Asking whether HNZC are winning or losing the battle (more houses being built? waiting lists growing or shrinking compared to employment?) would give us some insight into the performance of HNZC.

    But pulling a single incident and holding it up to the light during election silly season gives me the shits. Are we really supposed to base our opinion on a single out-of-context incident? I'm sure I could find individual quotes from John Key and Helen Clark that make them sound like child molesters, psychopaths, and saints. We all fuck up, companies and people. The question is whether it's a trend or an isolated incident. And that's what the Herald has clearly failed to address.

    Ti Point • Since Nov 2006 • 100 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: O.G.,

    Don't think of it as a salary, think of it as satire's long-overdue share of the arts funding bundle.

    Brilliant, Russell. Between this and David Slack's "budget of all mothers" (a line that will be drunk to wherever budget commentators gather) it's been a great week for zingers.

    I wear my Disneyland "Grumpy" hoodie all the time. Mysteriously I have never once been booed off our sleepy village street (excuse me, "heartland street" as it must be known in an election year), nor approached to facilitate the purchase of recreational pharmaceuticals. In fact, more people talk to me about bloody homeopathy than they do drugs. I don't think hoodies facilitate bad behaviour; the evidence suggests they facilitate bad science.

    Stick THAT in your allegedly-youth-purveyed crack pipe and smoke it, Oberwankenführer Mark.

    Ti Point • Since Nov 2006 • 100 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: Yes we canny,

    Two thoughts: before we go banging on about socialism and victorian divisions, read George Orwell's fabulous essay on language of politics. And anyone who thinks it's easy to balance a budget should play Budget Hero from the American radio show "Marketplace". I'd love to see a NZ version of that game, with a little more visibility into the end state of the various sectors.

    Ti Point • Since Nov 2006 • 100 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: Shooting for the Moon,

    @Paul Brislen: I'd be happy with 10Mb today (current speed is 1.5Mb on a good day) but remember, this is an arms race. Viewing the average news site's web page now takes 500K - 1M of data (HTML, javascript, images, embedded hooplah, etc.). If you want your web page to load in a second, then you need between 4 and 8 megabits per second of bandwidth (and low latency).

    But in the three/five/six/seven/nine years it takes to build the infrastructure, this average load size is going to increase. Anyone who builds infrastructure for ten years that can only handle today's load is a fool.

    Computer users know how this works: every few years they buy a computer that's twice the speed of the last one, but nothing runs twice as fast. The consumers of those resources (the programmers, the web page designers) have no pressure to minimize their burden on the resources, only to contain the irritation and frustration of slow programs/pages to an economically-sufficiently small group.

    I think rather than ask for a specific number out of the blue, ask what you're hoping to enable and work from that. It sounds like people should be able to get HD IPTV, phone, video-chat, and web all over the same connection. It's hard to estimate IPTV requirements, but a site I found on the net (the ultimate in scientific citations!) says 25-50Mbps per house. That's today. I don't think 1Gbps is unreasonable.

    Ti Point • Since Nov 2006 • 100 posts Report Reply

  • Hard News: The force is strong with this…,

    Re: the DSL experience, it's just variation on the same old. In the US, DSL was managed similar to NZ, where a former (and still effective) monopoly owned everyone's last mile (Qwest in Colorado's case, Telecom in NZ's) and gave ISPs hooks into the installation system to get DSL running for people.

    ISPs then become the first line of tech support for something they don't wholly manage. They can get irate customers because of the telco's failings. And, of course, they can always blame the telco and make the irate ISP customer problem (temporarily) go away. Customers would often end up in loops between ISP and Telco ("it's Qwest's fault, here's the number to call", "our systems show no faults at that address, it must be an ISP fault", "if you can't do X, the ISP mustn't have you in their system, call this number", ....).

    Phone support systems are often designed defensively, not offensively. In other words, they're viewed as a cost and a necessary evil, and they end up constructed as cheap-labour firewalls between ignorant consumers and the expensive technicians. The assumption is that the technology works, most customers are fine, so most people who call in are incompetent or misconfigured. Therefore cheap labour can sort them out, and the few genuine problems can get bumped to the few clueful techs.

    It's a nice idea, but it's a fantasy if you're selling cutting-edge or multi-vendor technology. This stuff breaks. No long are very few customers experiencing genuine problems. Cheap call-center labour gets in the way of solving their genuine technical problems. Most importantly, your call center is now your customers' primary brand interaction. When it fails and is frustrating for a lot of your customers, you're failing your brand and linking it tightly with that frustration.

    I know a company in the US that uses caller ID to put return callers through to the person they talked to last time, if possible. Do you think customers think of that company as an impersonal money sink? Hell no. Caller ID should bring up customer details. The only thing I hate more than long wait times is when I have to give my customer number and pin to three different people. Money spent on call centers and their underlying systems is money well spent.

    Something, of course, that we customers know but the managers of ISPs could stand to learn.

    Ti Point • Since Nov 2006 • 100 posts Report Reply

  • Island Life: What I've done with Julie…,

    1. I once wrote a favourable review of a John Key speech in exchange for sexual favours from a Young Nat.

    You said you'd never tell! This is worse than the time I had to bribe Nicky Hagar to leave out the bit about me, Don Brash, and a blue dress ....

    Ti Point • Since Nov 2006 • 100 posts Report Reply

  • Speaker: The Audacity of Hype: John Key…,

    My apologies for three incoherent thoughts bundled into one comment with no connective tissue. I blame the head cold currently dialling my cognitive faculties down to the level of a Big Brother contestant.

    Ti Point • Since Nov 2006 • 100 posts Report Reply

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