Category: Observations

Are movie executives smarter?

While this header sounds like one of those teenage girls’ magazine quizes, it is something I have to wonder. After this story on BBC it appears that it has taken the movie industry about a year after the emergence of technology that makes downloading their media viable (namely Bit-torrent (the pre-existing P2P applications realistically were a little average at downloading movie sized files with anything resembling decent video quality)), to them coming out and saying that they were going to start offering means of legally buying and downloading high quality movie content. This is by my reckoning about 4 times faster than the music industry (and in my opinion apart from iTunes they generally still haven’t figured it out).

They also seem to have realised, unlike (or perhaps because of) the music industry, that they should do the retailing themselves, otherwise they will loose revenue and market dominance to some other company (most likely Apple, let’s be honest) who is willing to think outside the box and implement the consumers’ demands in a reasonable framework. I’m all for it, given that if they can sort out a sensible and technically feasible system to buy and download video content then it won’t be long before TV and other video media start to arrive through the same systems. Then we’ll really have a game on our hands.

Mad chortling in the night

I have just been looking through my photo collection to find more pics to put on the site (I’m going to need a bigger server allocation pretty soon at this rate…), and anyone wandering past the window would have been easily forgiven for thinking that a mad scientist hard at his work resided in our place. I laughed particularly hard at some of the shit I was reminded we did during our amazing and care-free summers in Canberra. Damn those were great times. Anyway, the upside to all this is that there will be more new (or rather old) photos going up on the site in the next few days for everyone’s edification. Just a heads up…

5am

It is probably not in my best interest for Simone to leave me on my own like this. This is the second morning in a row where I have been awake to see 5am (it’s not that pretty, so I can’t say I readily understand why I am doing it). At least this time I have had a bit of sleep (as opposed to yesterday where I had been up all night playing Master of Orion 3) before waking up again..

Quotable

I read this today in “The Battle of Corrin”, by Brian Herbert, and felt it was a particularly insightful piece of wisdom, and one which all to many people don’t appreciate.

“The gravest error a thinking person can make is to believe that one particular version of history is absolute fact. History is recorded by a series of observers, none of whom is impartial. The facts are distorted by sheer passage of time and—especially in the case of the Butlerian Jihad—thousands of years of humanity’s dark ages, deliberate misrepresentations by religious sects, and the inevitable corruption that comes from an accumulation of careless mistakes. The wise person, then, views history as a set of lessons to be learned, choices and ramifications to be considered and discussed, and mistakes that should never again be made.
— PRINCESS IRULAN, preface to the History of the Butlerian Jihad”

Relative candlelight romance

On the bus on the way to the airport today I saw a poster advertising romantic candle lit dinners at several restaurants across Wellington. It made me wonder whether candle light has always held the romantic connotations it currently enjoys.
I wonder whether it was seen as romantic in medieval times when it constituted a functional, rather than a decorative light source, or whether it was only with the advent of newer forms of lighting (such as gas and electric) that it gained its romantic significance.

Reversi

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.

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…