Posts by Tom Beard
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METSERVCE I think the greater issue here is having a climate change denier heading up the Metservice.
Augie was never the head of MetService, and it's years since he was a spokesperson. All that he speaks for now is the ragtag collection of wingers, fossil-fuel corporates and random nutters that is the CSC.
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[Salinger] is letting his own bias on global warming/climate change effect the neutrality of his comments.
Yes, it's a slippery slope. Next thing you know, we'll have palaeontologists letting their bias on evolution affect the neutrality of their comments, or physicists letting their bias on gravity affect the neutrality of theirs.
Warm air is not *required* to hold more water vapor than cold air, but it *can* hold more water vapor than cold air.
Exactly. I spent seven years as a meteorologist at MetService, and inspecting the tephigram for precipitable water content was one of the first things we did to look for the possibility of heavy rain and how heavy it might be. The very word "precipitable" implies that it's about potential, so there still needs to be some forcing mechanism (surface heating, convergence, frontal activity) to get rain going, but all else being equal, warmer air has the potential to hold more water, and thus to release it as rain.
Actually, I think Augie taught me that.
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Rickards chose to be photographed with his teenage daughter for the Star Times' Focus section, presumably because it would have the effect of humanising him and emphasising his status as a family man. There is another way of seeing it: his daughter looks roughly the age of the complainants in two of the court cases.
Good, so it wasn't just me who was creeped out by that photo, then. It was also, AFAIK, the first time I've seen that tattoo: is that all part of the "conspiracy against a Maori police commissioner" thing?
It was like one giant San Francisco bath house.
What, you mean it had ironically ornate wallpaper, a big balcony full of smokers, Mint Chicks gigs and comedy nights? Oh, not __that__ San Franscisco Bath House, then.
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Yes, they do taste different - I guess I am just registering my surprise that you like one but not the other.
I can understand how one can prefer one over the other, but to my mind they're both fantastic in their own way. Lagavulin is far smoother and much more refined, but Laphroaig has that spooky "smoky bacon" aroma that always draws me in. It's also what makes it great for breakfast :-)
Whoops, if I keep making remarks like that, the alcohol police will be onto me now that "large amounts of alcohol" is defined as more than six drinks in a session.
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Dell are still selling XP machines, but you have to find the link that says "Do you still want to buy a computer with XP?" before they'll show them to you. Most of the high street stores (even Quay computers, which I used to think had a bit more nous than the others) are 90% Vista only now, and look at you strangely if you say you don't want it. Mind you, any place that thinks WXGA counts as a high resolution screen isn't worth your time.
In the end I went with ascent.co.nz: that's a really sueful filter engine they've got there.
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Tom, bro, it ain't html :)
Blame it on nearly 15 years of habit!
And back to the topic... does anyone have experience with Vodafone's vodem 3G thinggy (sorry for the technical jargon)? On paper it looks like it might get slightly better bandwidth than I'm currently getting from Woosh, only slightly more expensive, and a lot more portable. There's a much lower data cap, but I rarely use 1Gig a month anyway.
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Because I've moved house a lot, and want to have my own internet access in various workplaces, I've stuck with Woosh. It's much more reliable now than it was a year ago, but it's <i>not</i> "broadband".
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It looks like local councils, even fairly right-wing ones, are coming to the same conclusion.
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Aargh, rogue apostrophe! Please let me edit that before I get lynched by Jo.
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I've bought that Shropshire Blue before from Kirk's fromagerie (it's not a proper little neighbourhood cheese shop, but it's a good equivalent) and: wow. I have a friend who's a cheesatarian (he's a vegetarian who doesn't like vegetables) an dbetween us we demolished it very quickly.
Delicious, and no orangutan's were harmed in the making of that cheese, which is more than I can say for "palm oil beef hooked".