Posts by Paul Campbell
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I think I was saved by discovering blues and brit-ska - especially the british punky blues - and I'm happy that my son will also throw the Beat on occasionally
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(that was in response to Robyn - disco was forced on us by all the media - BOTH radio stations when I was a teen - I was horrified a few years back when a baby sitter brought her disco oldies over to play - and she wasn't being ironic)
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But I still have an abiding hatred of disco ...
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for those who just heard Son of Dave on 9 to noon -
I've also loaded up my kid's ipods with "music I think they should like" ... sometimes it's worked sometimes it hasn't - sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised - some stuff has become family favorites (MIA, B52s, even some Tom Waits) but they still pick up stuff that annoys us with its banality - I think that's the natural order of things
We put all our CDs on a family (firewalled) in-home music server so they have access to everything we have for their ipods (except for the vinyl, one of these days I'll spend a month and digitise all of it too) so occasionally I get a 'Dad can we get X' and I get to be cool Dad who already has the neat stuff at home
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It's a difficult choice isn't - it the guy's heart stopped beating for an hour - he ought to have been brain dead even if it did start beating again - equally his organs, without oxygen, would have been pretty close to being useless for transplant
My organs are up for grabs if I kick the bucket or become a vegetable (don't get any ideas ...) because I see the upside - my family's been told and I carry a card
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to be fair the 5 things vaguely worth watching were on Echostar/Dish a satellite service in the US with a lot more channels than Sky - it was sunday night and at least 2 were first run on HBO - I think from memory it was something like: Sopranos (mine), Sex in the City (my wife's), the Simpsons (the kids) and probably Law and Order - at which point I decided to watch the news live
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that's actually quite sad - it should be downloading the long-term EPG by snooping as you tune around or by using a free tuner when it's available - storage is not an issue, it's got a hard drive to put it on after all and the EPG is less than 10s of MBs
Whether they can stream 3 HD channels to disk and play a recorded one at the same time will be interesting (it's hard to do)
The number of tuners on a PVR seems to have a couple of sweet spots - one is the number of TVs supported plus one, the other is 2 tuners per TV - 3 is more than you mostly end up needing - but I guess the EPG restriction does kind of mean you need one more
I've lived with a 4 tuner PVR for a while and actually managed to run out on a Sunday night by scheduling 4 things at once and then trying to tune live
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Actually here in Dunedin we've had a second newspaper start up in the past two weeks - a free weekly tabloid for the moment - and a bit bright and garish - but they seem to be trying to be legitimate - and god knows the ODT needs a kick in the pants (sadly they'll probably just turn up the colour)
If they do well here we'll let them take on the Herald
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no - it's a practical thing - I do this sort of crypto for a living, it's a somewhat paranoid part of the business - secrecy is ingrained (Sky's crypto is reputedly done by a bunch of ex-Mossad people) and given the long history of broadcast crypto and crypto-hacking somewhat understandable.
From my point of view Sky is actually a long shot potential customer alienating them would be a bad thing
For the record (and I do find I keep having to tell random strangers this) sure, I know lots of people's crypto secrets - but because of the way modern crypto is done I honestly don't know how to steal digital TV .... unless you can show me how to factor large primes