Posts by Paul Campbell
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actually I think people find the dateline confusing - and the idea that countries south of the equator might have DST at different times of the year (and the timezone offsets might change 4 times a year) more than difficult
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when I was a student in ChCh my flatmate (who worked nights in a restaurant) used to let her robe slowly slip until the mormons went away
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Maybe we need to do a "people who work at home" session at foo-camp (we can either commiserate and get drunk together or swap working tips). I've done it for about half of the past 20 years - so far I have 2 rules:
* you must get dressed by lunch time, no hanging around in your bath robe
* you must leave the house and interact with actual people at least every other day -
Heh - at least once a week I have to start a phone conversation with "it's 6am on Saturday morning, why are you calling me?" ....
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I think that DRM in general was a bill of goods sold to the media companies as a way to survive. The problem with ANY DRM is that you have to embed a secret in your customer's equipment and forbid them to look at it - the result is often the locking down of the entire piece of equipment or neutering its functionality - it's a pretty silly concept to build a business around when you think about it.
The DRM providers popped up and sold the music companies what they wanted - control over a fast changing technology - except it was done pretty incompetently and generally pissed off the customers - more importantly it pissed of the geeks who'd bought shiny new toys and wanted to do cool stuff with them.
I also think the media companies have a mistaken idea about what people think they are doing when they buy music. When I buy a CD I expect it to be mine, I can treat it like any other object I own - we all understand how to deal with things, what ownership means, it's ingrained in us from an early age - "we didn't sell you the music, just a license to use it as we see fit" is I think lost on most people - confusing and alienating your customers doesn't work as a business strategy.
In reality the world has changed - big music companies also knew how to deal with things, they printed sheet music, then pressed LPs, then CDs and sold them, they had warehouses and brick and mortar stores - they have a gigantic world wide infrastructure in place to do that - but really they're selling access to information and we all have a quicker, faster, cheaper way to do that these days - (as I've said before) they're dinosaurs, the comet has landed, nuclear winter has kicked in and they're responding with lawyers, meanwhile the mammals are hiding in the cracks, evolving like crazy and hoping they don't get stomped on in the final frenzy
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Steve - check out Amarok - the ipod touches work with it (you do have to root it first) - I set my kids ones up to work on their Linux boxes
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oooh - I remember the speedos with the color changing line as a kid - it seemed so modern at the time, in retrospect it was a cute hack - my parents had a beige and powder blue an Austin Cambridge A65
My first car was a 1946 Austin-8 (made with the same plans they were using before the war) cost me $100 in 1973 - probably worth $20K or more to a collector these days (I bought most of a second for parts for $50).
Years later while working on my mini I realised that you could trace the history of english cars with the different families of nuts/bolts used in different parts of the cars (a mini needed at least 3 socket sets to pull apart) - deep inside the engine the mini and the old austin 8 were the same
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Bart - I love that drive over I-80 between CA and NV too - but in reverse - I used to go out to the BlackRock desert in northern NV 3-4 times a year and that escape, away from the Bay Area and up out of the heat of the Central Valley into the Sierras, the way the landscape opens up into rocksand trees, and maybe still some snow is still a guilty pleasure even though I don't get to do it much any more - the sagebrush reminds me a bit of Central Otago in the heat of winter - coming home, in traffic down off the Sierras is just a chore and not as much fun (worse during ski season)
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holding your breath across bridges was a family tradition for us too - the ultimate being the one lane bridge (with passing bays) across the mouth of the Haast
Dad used to drive slower and slower toward the end of bridges just to taunt us, eventually I figured out that it didn't really matter and learned to puff out my cheeks and breathe thru my nose - a bit like the way I learned to silently 'sing' in high school assembly and avoid the ire of the music teacher and my neighbours for being painfully out of tune
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strangely when I think of that drive I don't think of pasture, but of the tree plantations, and the year we went by and they had all been blown down - as an adult the drive seems so much shorter, as a kid it went on and on forever.
When I went to Uni in ChCh I had the opposite experience - having grown up in Dunedin where the city is always around you as its own reference map - in Chch I felt lost there was no there there - I never actually got lost, it wasn't until I moved to the northern hemisphere I discovered that somehow navigate by the sun - there are still bits of LA that are backwards in my mental map
One year, coming back on holiday from the US we were driving down through there in a rental, still dazed from the plane flight across the pacific the night before, heading for the turn off to Lindis when we turned on the national program - Kim Hill came on and announced that Nirvana would now play "Smells like teen spirit", we'd been away for a long time, things had really changed ... at the end there was a moment of stunned silence and Kim announced "well we're never ever playing that again" - we couldn't stop laughing, almost drove off the road