Posts by Tom Beard
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and as for banks... not everyone has forgotten he's a bigot.
I have a horrible feeling that he may have got in partly because of that, rather than despite it.
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I must admit I thought that Howlett was Maori!
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"Iggy Pop blew the band off-stage."
I'll be off to scrub out my own frontal lobe now. Damn this vivid imagination...
Too late: I've seen Velvet Goldmine.
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The song, as if you couldn't guess, was 'Why Does Love Do This To Me?'.
Sorry to be a troll, but words cannot express the intensity with which I loathe that song. That's mostly due to a traumatic experience in the early 90s after being dragged along to a work ski weekend, and after a day of getting very expensively wet and bruised, being pressganged into the local pub. Hordes of drunken commerce students, with white polonecks under chambray shirts with Dockers and boat shoes, clutching their Corona and limes and belting out that wailing chorus...
I guess I'll never be a proper Kiwi.
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I've been working on some routing software, and while the core algorithms (Dijkstra, A* etc) are well-known and easy to implement, it's data capture that makes it a really curly task if you want to make it as accurate as possible.
For driving, you'd have to use speed limit and traffic light data and some estimates of congestion. Pedestrian routing, which on the face of it is much simpler (no need to worry about one-way streets), gets very tricky when you start to think about crossing times at intersections, slope, shelter, and all those quasi-public shortcuts that you mention. I'm working on updating our own maps, and since the "official" data from places like Terralink & LINZ omits a whole lot of pedestrian connections, I've been manually adding as many as I can.
With any luck, that might eventually filter into a proper pedestrian routing API. Actually, most people who live in a particular city will already know their way around, but it's vital for "find nearest" applications: the "nearest" ATM or whatever may be only 100m as the crow flies, but if that involves a suicide dash across a motorway or swimming across the harbour, it's not much use.
As an example of how bad things can get based on the assumption (made by most map providers) that everyone is driving, here's a 1 minute walk that's a three minute drive. Actually, that's a pretty good example of why it's better to leave the car at home :-)
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I find 6pm is the ideal time to cook dinner.
It works for me at the moment because of my partner's timetable, but at other times in my life it was way too early. I guess it's one way of enforcing work-life balance: unless you're an early riser, it's hard to do more than 40 hours a week if you have to be home by 6pm every day!
If I time it right, it's cooking but not yet ready to be served by sports news time, which is increasingly the only bit worth watching.
Apart from the headlines, it's really only the weather that I hang out for.
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I am also with Joanna about the multi-tasking. My flatmates often drag the ol laptop into the living room to do something productive during all of the downtime during the news. I hardly ever watch the news at all.
I guess I do that quite a lot, but I find it very limiting. Blame it on male inability to multitask if you like, but I find it hard to craft the perfect sentence or analyse complex statistics while the news (or anything else) is blaring away. But then, what I'm usually trying to do on the internet might be quite different from what most people want from it.
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i was going to be pendantic about the audience that vox pop was conducted in not being representative...
but then thought, waitaminute, tech people are the leaders in this field - what they do will set trends for what happens out in the burbclaves.
Possibly, but I still think that it's possible for us to get carried away with the idea that our own little bubble of tech-savvy early adopters is representative. I consider myself to be a fairly heavy internet user, but I felt a bit out of the loop at the Wellington Great Blend due to the general atmosphere of "well, hasn't everyone already downloaded the next series of Lost/Sopranos/whatever?". That's because:
a) I don't have much time for watching TV, downloaded or otherwise
b) most of those shows don't appeal to me that much
c) I have a little too much respect for other people's IP to pirate things quite so casually
d) I'm on, erm, Woosh, so anything longer than a 2-minute YouTube clip is a pain to download.I couldn't quite see it on the fuzzy projector, but it seemed to me that in the survey of internet heavy-users' viewing habits, the answers available to the question "if you're watching less TV now, what are you doing with your time?" only included options such as using the internet, reading and gaming. Nothing that involves, you know, getting out of the house. Isn't there anyone who'd rather spend their time saved by not watching TV on things like going for a walk, meeting friends for a drink, going to the theatre, eating out, going dancing etc etc? Or perhaps the respondents are already stuck in the bubrclaves.
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One line spun that is about promoting Phil Goff, who I also sprayed in the article, was pure Nixon.
Is it just me, or is that a really, really poorly constructed sentence? Even in context, it's hard to work out what on earth he's talking about.
The sanctimonious nature of everyone in that ALAC ad is enough to drive anyone to drink.
Exactly! While the drunk versions of the characters end up committing some atrociously embarrassing acts, overall it's hard not to get the impression that they'd be better company than their sober selves.
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I don't know if they were Engineering students, but those riotus folk down Dunedin at weekend were definitely doing the Haka.
Sorry, must have missed out the <sarcasm weight="heavy"> tags.
When I was at uni, back before the invention of fire, we used 'engineer' to refer to a particular behaviour, not a degree choice.
That's my recollection too, and what didn't ring quite true about the "mostly engineers and science/footy types" quote earlier. In my experience, we science students were definitely geeks rather than jocks, and while the engineers across the river were getting ready for the chunder mile we'd be planning a riotous weekend of Scrabble and watching Carl Sagan videos.