Posts by Kyle Matthews
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I first went online in 1994 when the University of Otago started handing out stonebow email addresses to students. The Stonebow is one of the two bridges that crosses the Brandywine river in the Shire (the pop server was brandywine).
For a few weeks it seems relatively useless. It was all held on a floppy disk, and I'd go in and check once a day, and no one would email me. Not unsurprising as I didn't know anyone in the world who had an email address.
I had a play with gopher, and managed to find some email lists of interest - left-wing student politics stuff, mostly from the USA. That started to fill up my inbox, and link what I was doing in my real life with the 'virtual world'.
One day I got an email from a person in Baltimore USA, who had been searching for the email of a friend with a similar name. She emailed me to introduce herself, and we emailed back and forth. A couple of months later I was spending my nights in computer labs, emailing her a dozen times a night, and spending my time in between chatting on a talker. Phone calls, presents, photos etc all followed, and in June 1995 I flew to America to spend five weeks with her. In a somewhat sad stereotype, 'internet love' was my first serious relationship.
We drove down to New Orleans and back, I hung out at her work when she wasn't able to get leave etc. Things were OK, but they didn't feel perfect like they should. After I returned I decided that it really wasn't a great relationship, and broke it off. She went what can only be described as a little bit 'internet psycho' - getting friends to harass me in chat rooms, logging in as multiple personalities, posting stories about me. I just stopped talking to her altogether and eventually she stopped.
A couple of years later she contacted me again to see how I was. I was distant, and she talked about things and people that we had spoken about in an 'update' kind of way. Except time had made her get her stories crossed. Things didn't match what she had told me years before, people got crossed over. What used to be two friends was now the same person. I had kept the thousands of emails that we had sent each other, and I went back and looked and came to the conclusion that at some part of what she told me was a lie constructed in her mind. So I took it all and jumped in my Dad's car, drove around central wellington at 2am, and found a rubbish bin to dump it all in. It felt great too.
I heard from her again a couple of years ago and she married some guy that she didn't really love, moved towns and jobs to something she hates, and sounded terrible. I didn't have it within me to care however. The internet has offered me much better since (I also met my current partner online, but she's a local).
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What if the Maori Party hadn't been the last cab off the rank?
I think Maori Party in with Greens and Labour is going to be a coalition possibility, but it'll take a couple of electoral terms for them to be close enough to kiss and make up, just like it took a couple of terms for Labour and Alliance to do so.
There will need to be distance in terms of time from the SB & FS.
Also, I don't think the Maori party are any more stable than NZ First at present.
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Cut me some slack dude, I had a flu :)
You had flu and you spent time thinking "when is sport art?". *peers*
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Don't you think a thirty year career as an MP and Cabinet Minister in three separate governments gives you some degree of credibility?
I don't think he's had any credibility for a decade now.
Personally I wish someone would bring in a psychologist. There's some serious paranoia issues going on there with how he deals with the media, it'd be good to get it diagnosed and get him some help.
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No, not the wrong place at all. I would hope that someone would come along and say "no, fuck off, sport is not art".
Wot, no analysis of the points table of the tri-nations with predictions for the weekend and thoughts on what needs to happen for the ABs to finish tops?
No response to the scrapping of the cricket in Pakistan?
No 'top two' list of "teams that are going to be cut from the Air NZ Cup but are still performing better than Waikato"?
Danny Lee? Going to be NZ's best ever golfer, or just flash in the pan kids stuff?
Warriors - finals bound or not?
What sort of pansy-arsed 'sport/art' sports blog is this anyway? Man...
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Meh.
Odds that Che Tibby has never used an Americanism?
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I loved that ad! Like Islander, made no impact on my consumption of the product. :)
It's pretty dated isn't it? If it came up now you can imagine some marketing guy coughing politely. "Umm, so the kids are a little obese, not really the image we're looking to convey these days about the product..."
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Clinton's speaking style reminds me of a not particularly inspiring kindergarten teacher. "No way, no how, no McCain." It's not exactly JFK, MLK is it.
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Based on my experiences in the court system, you have a court file once you walk in the door.
The police summary, if that's what they're quoting, is often a shocker. The one that the arresting officer had written for my arrest was barely literate. I was tempted to demand that it be resubmitted if it was going to form part of the official record of my life when I got diverted, but thought that they might withdraw the diversion if I got uppity.
Accuracy would also be something to hope for, but they have probably taken more time with Tony Veitch's than they did for my arrest for midnight noise raids on the hotels of National Party conference attendees.
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I made a conscious choice, as a person who chose not to eat McDonalds for a number of years, not to push that on my child.
When he's old enough to start to make moral choices like that, I'd absolutely encourage him to explore that. But at four, with friends having birthday parties there, and the allure of happy meals and the joy that McDonalds brought to him, I didn't feel that there was any great benefit to banning an occasional McDonalds meal, and certainly not one that outweighed what he would miss out on.
My wee daughter has so many bad reactions to food, she'll never be able to eat in any restaurant that mixes more than two food types together, but I suspect she'll also get to go there as well, as long as they keep allowing you to dictate what you do/don't want in your burger.