Posts by JackElder
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...snakebit puncture .... nail out of the tyre
Nitpick: that wasn't a snakebite; a snakebite puncture is when you hit something hard enough with tyre pressure low enough that the rim "grounds out" as the tyre herniates slightly to each side, so you get two small parallel cuts in the tube. These look like your tyre's been fanged, hence the name.
I hear you, though. Cycling around through to Oriental Bay and along the waterfront last night was glorious. One of my friends rode home from Upper Hutt to Hataitai, it was so good.
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Brown Sugar- that's the one.
We were driving through Taihape in about 2000, and stopped off there. After about five minutes, my wife quietly told me that the staff were taking turns to sidle out of the kitchen and stare at me. I'm not a particularly unusual looking bloke, but I did have 12mm flesh tunnels in my earlobes (i.e. big enough to comfortably fit a pen/little finger through the lobe), which I guess weren't a common feature of life in Taihape at the time. Good scones though.
The Brown Sugar cafe in Otaki is pretty nice, too. I'm quite fond of that wee place near Marton - the Sugar Plum, I think. It's a random city-style cafe in the middle of a lot of fields.
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I have absolutely no automobile nostalgia. We had cars when I was a kid. I seem to recall them having a wheel at each corner, and that was about as far as my interest went. Possibly the fact that I was very prone to motion sickness (like, I used to vomit on the 3k journey up through Wadestown to the supermarket) had something to do with my diffidence.
The only speeding ticket I've ever got was when I'd borrowed my mother-in-law's car one time. Daihatsu Move - basically a large breadbox with a 600cc engine. Two adults in the front, two kids in the back, and we hit the bottom of a hill in Titirangi at about 65 in a 50 zone. Whoops.
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It's like the joke I heard when I was in the UK:
What's the difference between an Australian and the engines on a 747?
The engines stop whining when the plane lands at Heathrow.
Actually, Kiwis in England aren't particularly seen as whingers - they're normally seen as bar staff.
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Any predictions about the words of 2009?
"Police Nanny" - as in, police state meets nanny state. You'll go along with what they say if you know what's good for you/want your pudding.
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Stop W00Ting and send me your delivery address!
Done!
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I was under the impression that every place on earth had much the same amount of sky over it (whether visible or not).
The best part about coming back to New Zealand, back when I lived in Tokyo in the late 80s, was walking from the old International Terminal at Auckland to the Domestic Terminal. You'd emerge from the building, and be hit by this incredibly blue, incredibly big sky, with light of a clarity you'd not seen since you were last there. It's not just the skies - the light has a lot to do with it. I reckon NZ's about an F-stop brighter than the UK.
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W00t!
Assuming, on sober reflection, that it's actually me and not my namesake, the ex-Minister of Police. That was particularly embarassing when I was a student - his personal number was unlisted, mine wasn't, leading to a number of "hilarious" phone calls.
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Oh and BTW, the winner of the other case of wine -- the random draw from the list of voters -- was Jack Elder.
W00t!
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What does a tech writer do - is it something like gathering all the relevant info for a set of processes...
That, and writing the user manuals, online help, etc for software, plus writing maintenance manuals for machining equipment... anything where you're trying to tell someone how to use a system. It's a surprisingly wide field.
Not that anyone ever reads the stuff we write, mind. At one point, one manual I'd written turned out to have profanities in one of the screenshots (never borrow data sets from the dev team, kids). No-one noticed for 18 months.
At least, not that they told us.