One of the things that I have found whenever I move to a new place is that when I am walking down the street my brain keeps on expecting to see people I knew in the last place I lived.
The odd thing about this current flying visit to Wellington has been that on several occasions I have found myself expecting to see people I know from Brisbane walking around here in Wellington.
Author: Dave
Summer ale export petition
Being back in NZ I invariably take the opportunity to re-acquaint myself with the fine local beers, and always find myself wishing that I could get Monteiths Summer Ale in back in Australia. I’m sure that I am not the only person who would buy it if they sent it our way. Perhaps I should start a petition. 🙂
Soldiers on the streets
I was reminded today what a brilliant country New Zealand is to live in after seeing soldiers on the streets. Two of them were officers out for a bagel and coffee for lunch. Two others were young male soldiers looking at CDs in a music store, and the last one was a female soldier (in uniform) looking at handbags and (rather pretty) high heeled strappy party shoes.
Revolving Doors
I dropped into my friend Duncan’s work today and to get into the building you had the option of going through a revolving door. Now I don’t know if I have simply stopped noticing them, or if they have kind of gone out of fashion, but I don’t recall the last time I went through a revolving door, and I found the experience highly, well I suppose the terms “fun” and “nostalgic” best describe it.
Joining the jetset
Now many of you will be familiar with the high esteem in which I hold my home town of Wellington, and will have sat patiently through my extended rantings about its merits and virtues, and this post I’m afraid will probably be more on that theme.
One of my good old high school friends (I should probably clarify that I mean good old friend, rather than good old school) is getting married this weekend, and so I am doing something which seems at the same time fun and financially inadvisable (the phrase “fiscally blasphemous” keeps appearing in my head, but I don’t think it’s an accurate use of that word, and the other option of “anathema” seems too strong), namely flying to Wellington just for the weekend. Initially I was concerned that it may be quite an expensive exercise, but it actually ended up not being too pricey, however it may be setting a rather bad precident, as I do so love being in Wellington that I may well feel inclined to do this more frequently in years to come.
I may find myself tempted to pop over to go to fidel’s, or to ride the cable car, or see Te Papa, or… well you get the idea. Bad precident…
Music industry incompetence
Now with the acquisition of our previously mentioned non-proxied internet conection I found myself in the position of once again being able to download music. Recently however my conscience (pushy little so and so that it is) has been troubling me on the downloading music front, and so I decided to try doing things the legal way. First I installed iTunes, only to be informed that the iTunes store was unavailable in my country (a fact that apple had prominently failed to mention anywhere on their website). Since that was the only music provider that I specifically knew anything about I went to the ARIA website.
Now my rational here was that seeing as the ARIA people were supposed to be the main advocacy group for Ausalian music artists, and were so opposed to illegal downloads, I reasoned that they would be doing everything in their power to promote existing legal alternatives, and as such would have links to online music stores operating within Australia.
How wrong I was – not that I can admit to being overly surprised. After all, it took them something like 5 years to realise that music downloading was something that they weren’t going to be able to stamp out, and was in fact something they were going to be able to make money out of. What I found was that the ARIA site contained not a single mention of how you could download music legally, or even any propoganda espousing the relative virtues of “doing the right thing”, so to speak.
As an industry advocacy group I can only conclude that ARIA are doing a singularly shithouse job of actually advocating anything, and having eventually found some music stores (off my own bat), I was left with the conclusion that even after all this time the music industry still has no concept of what the consumer actually wants, and that if they don’t provide a product that in some way atg least vaguely resembles what the consumer wants, they have next to no chance of ever attracting people away from the existing illegal alternative.
Calcium sky
I was poking around (being a bit of a geek (Ok, so nothing new there)) the other day, and found this article in Icarus (Volume 173, Issue 2, Pages 300-311) entitled “The calcium exosphere of Mercury” about how it would seem that Mercury has an exosphere around it’s poles composed of gaseous calcuim. Toasty….
Nature Futures
Nature has started publishing “Futures” again. they first ran futures, which are one page speculative science fiction stories, in 1999, and I fell in love with them, as they were almost universally clever and insightful.
So if you have a nearby academic library, drop in and read a few.
A little gem from Phil
My mate Phil, who some of you may know, and who is always full of entertaining little oddities, sent me this the other day:
It’s a Maoist review of Alpha Centauri
http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bookstore/vgames/alphacentauri.html
(Alpha Centauri is a computer game and if you don’t know anything about it you should firstly ask James, Phil or I what it is, and once we’ve finished our rant you should go out and buy a copy and prepare yourself to loose the next 18 odd hours (at least) to playing it).
Anyway, the review is quite a funny read.
Rejoining the 80’s
Well, in addition to finally getting a web page (which is much more 90’s than 80’s), I also got around to rejoining the 80’s last thursday, in so much as that I went and bought a VCR.
We already have a DVD player (which we seem to mostly use to watch and avidly re-watch the Harry Potter movies), but recent events involving conflicting viewing preferences (Simone wants to watch ER and I’ve become more attached to Lost) meant that we had to acquire some form of recording technology.
Now what would have been really cool to get was one of those new ~$1500 Hard disk recording/DVD writing gizmos (I don’t even know if they have an official name) so that I could record my shows 21st century style, but given the economic (the VCR cost all of $120 – isn’t it surprising, I remember when they were three or four hundred, and constituted a fairly major investment) and technical realities (our middle aged TV doesn’t have input ports for that kind of new fangled technical wizardry) I will have to put off that particular non-necessity until some later stage.