Posts by Jake Pollock
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Southerly: Getting There is Half the Fun, in reply to Russell Brown,
It’s LAX. It wasn’t built to sustain the volumes of passengers it gets especially post-911 and post- the restrictions on liquids that kicked in in 2007. What’s more, for some reason the airport is a microcosm of the city and as such is built around a multi-tiered highway and a huge carpark. It’s so weird. Why is it that the only place you can eat once you’ve gone through security for an international flight is that sub-par Mexican place? No one knows.
And yes that transit lounge situation is still all kinds of wrong.
As Danielle said, SFO is pretty good. Dallas/Fort Worth is great if you’re heading south and can fly through Sydney. Plenty of the internal hubs have a lot going for them – Detroit is nice but weirdly long; Denver is awesome (cowboy hats!conspiracy theories! Chicago O’Hare is awful; Washington Dulles is fine and has a five guys; Atlanta is okay.
On the regional level, you can get barbecue in Memphis, a “y’all come back now y’hear?” in Nashville, and Pittsburgh, which is the best airport of all, has a dinosaur skeleton, a pirate, and free wi-fi.
It’s really not all bad and most airports -- even though the security isn’t exactly relaxed -- don't have the same intensity as LAX.
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As Gareth said, a meat thermometer is life-changing if you cook meat and want to consistently hit the right temperatures. Cook your steak to 52º, let it rest for ten minutes, and its perfectly medium rare every time. It doesn’t even need to be a fancy digital one that beeps, although those are pretty cool.
In terms of lighting your charcoal grill, rather than pouring gasoline all over it, get yourself a chimney starter. In 20 minutes you’ll get enough briquettes hot enough to roast a leg of lamb to beyond well done if that’s what you really want.
Also, if you want to slow-cook a pork shoulder, or anything really, on a charcoal grill, use the fuse method described here. Only you don’t need to use lighter fluid to light it, just your chimney starter on a few briquettes, and my pork shoulders only tend to take seven hours from start to 93º.
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Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to Lilith __,
Anecdata only, but I know a couple of people who have been hospitalised after being doored. That's why I never ride in the door zone.
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Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to Christopher Dempsey,
You can solve that problem by not riding in the door zone. If the car behind you gets frustrated it can pass and you can wave cheerfully as the driver swears at you. You can also help yourself by looking into the cars to see if there's a driver in there who might be about to open it. Don't be intimidated into putting yourself in harm's way. If you're between the sidewalk and the car you are always in the door zone and always in harm's way and there's nothing you can do about it. Terrifying.
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Hard News: Dressing for the Road, in reply to Liz Tan,
I'd be interested to know what the crowd and the council think of bike lanes which go between sidewalk and parked cars.
Terrifying. When that passenger door swings open in front of you you'll have nowhere to go but into it.
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Actually, I just looked through my notes and can't find the Tasman account that would be evidence of that. Perhaps I'm perpetuating a myth.
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Hard News: Higgs Live!, in reply to linger,
Single-hulled canoes replaced double-hulled ones.
That, at least, can't be ascribed to a tsunami that happened 500 years ago. When Tasman sailed into Golden Bay in 1642 the Māori he encountered used double-hulled waka. When Cook arrived he noted that the double-hulled waka had disappeared and been forgotten about in the intervening 120 years. It seems to me that its more likely that the establishment of inter-island trading routes that Islander describes is responsible. My guess is that the double-hulled waka were more suitable to sea-faring, whereas the single-hulled ones were more useful for coasting and warfare.
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Never heard of Hogg's Bison. Did they discover it at Fermilab?
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Hard News: Who'd have thought?, in reply to Scott Chris,
First things first.
Seems to me that you're putting the last thing first.
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Hard News: The not-so-Evil Empire, in reply to Tom Ackroyd,
f I want to update an app on an iPad will the update proceed even if it's not able to run on the installed iOS?
I installed Angry Birds Space on my four year old iPod Touch. It installed but wouldn't run because the graphics chip in the iPod wasn't good enough.
And:
One day, perhaps, Google will find a way to let my Google Apps profile work with Google+. That would be good.
For the last year or two that I lived in Pittsburgh I couldn't get Chrome to log in to any Google services except for gmail. It was most annoying for Maps, because I would have to enter my home address every time I wanted to know what time the bus was leaving. As soon as I moved back to NZ everything worked fine.