Posts by Morgan Nichol
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So, I feel that a huge fuck-you-very-much needs to go out to Act voters right about now.
I was in the Epsom electorate for last election, and I did everything I could to stop them. In this case that amounted to holding my nose and dropping my electorate vote on National.
Fuckers.
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I am clearly the only person in the world running Vista on both a desktop and a laptop with no problems at all. I have never had a blue screen of death, a crashed anything, or issues with my three browsers and multiple tabs running concurrently. I feel deprived of prime bitching-on-the-internet possibilities!
Not really. I've been running Vista 64 rock solid without a crash since I installed it ~18 months or so ago.
Best OS I've ever used. Which makes these "hateful fucking Vista put centipedes in my vagina!!!" threads a bit bizarre.
I have a (lovely looking) iMac next to my (serious looking) Dell workstation, it's used... sparingly.
The only thing that's ever fucked me off is the lack of a good Cisco IPSEC compatible vpn client, Cisco's own explicitly blocks installation on 64 bit OSs, and a free alternative I found has a completely insane configuration scheme, which I haven't ever managed to navigate. So instead I built a few (sexy as fuck) ssh tunnels (using plink, which is so goddamn good I can barely stand it), to handle the few little things I need to be able to get into the work LAN to use.
My search for a good lightweight word processor that's not Word (but can save and open Word documents) continues, though. I didn't like Apple's Pages much at all -- not least because I couldn't find a way to paste from the web into a Pages document as plain text.
I'm a fan of google docs. Use OpenOffice as well, it's ok. I guess it doesn't count as lightweight to you? Maybe an upgrade is on order. You have my permission to buy the new iMac.
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BSOD
Blob of Sperm On Dress?
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I'm sure it has nothing to do with the influential airport company making over 30 million dollars every year from carparking fees.
Clearly I don't think about this enough with my 5 minute walking commute, bloody parking earnings hadn't occurred to me.
I'm sure some more interesting use for the land could be cooked up by someone with more than a quarter of a brain though. How about a nice park. The sort with trees and grass and fountains.
No money in that. :(
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It might be absurd. but it might not be either.....in time. I look forward to other options. There aren't too many left though. Look outside of the box.
Of course it's absurd. The number of people who want to go North of Auckland without travelling through Auckland for the odd holiday is DWARFED by the number of people in Auckland who just want to be able to get around every day.
Among other absurd things: that we don't have rail from the airport to Britomart. Now that is just fucking nuts.
I'm absolutely glowing with optimism at the moment though, so many people are enthusiastic about investing in the new rail loop that perhaps we'll get some momentum, allowing expansion of the network.
I've never been in a position to commute on a train, currently I walk to work every day, when I was young enough not to mind being sweaty at work I cycled every day, but mostly I've driven. But the scant few times I've had opportunity to take the train into Britomart it was GREAT. I'd use a train to the airport every damn time. It'd make our visitors much happier too. Frankly I think it's bizarre that a line isn't already in.
(Then we just have to raze the Downtown building and replace it with a beautiful park, with fountains and art, so when people come up to surface level they aren't met with an eyeful of god damn concrete.)
How much freight comes out of the airport in trucks to the city, drop all of that crap into a rail cars, and deliver it to within scant moments of the central post sorting station. (I don't actually know how much freight this represents, but every truck off the roads is good in my view.)
We could also create a kilometres long holographic tunnel to hide the godsawful light industrial, warehousing, and shit-house burbage that all happy tourists are currently shunted through. "Welcome to New Zealand, as you can see it looks like it sucks, but don't let that fool you, we've just decided it would be smart to take you through the VERY WORST OF IT as you first experience here."
Anyway, it looks like a hell of a lot of work has been done already on fixing this ludicrous oversight, and that there's support from ACTA and ARC, but it still looks like it's pretty far in the distance:
http://www.aucklandtrains.co.nz/2009/08/19/airport-rail-link-becomes-top-future-priority/ -
Catering for rail, cyclists, and pedestrians is really all I care about from any of the proposals. And this project claims to do just that. I don't recall the tunnel ever offering a pedestrian or cycle option.
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It didn't take terribly much more reading around the site to come to the same conclusion. These people are fucking NUTS. It doesn't mean they aren't correct about that video being legit, but it seems like it might be breaking the habit of a lifetime.
Do these people ever realise, once they're about a thousand "sieg heils" and "pull them all out and execute them" and "zionist conspiracies" deep, that anything they say about the real things they actually hold important only diminishes the value of what they're talking about?
They're like a credibility black hole. The only thing that can escape its pull is incoherent rage.
Unfortunate, because it's crystal clear that there are genuine grievances with the way the police (and - what the fuck are they even doing there?! - military) are handling protesters.
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Matt Talbot was kind enough to send me through a couple of startling URLs from Amazon.com. This one for Uncle Fester's Secrets of Methamphetamine Manufacture and this one for Jack B. Nimble's The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories. Both are listed as popular in - you guessed it - New Zealand. They rank 8001 and 99,454 on Amazon's overall sales chart - and numbers 19 and 9 respectively in sales to New Zealand! Good grief …
That is absolutely astonishing.
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Another related item, from the Times Online today. A police officer has been suspended and charged with 'assault by beating', for striking a female protestor with his baton. Caught on a camera phone.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article6852445.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=2015164
At the same protests, and just a day after Ian Tomlinson died entirely coincidentally to being assaulted by police, from behind, while walking away from them and apparently doing absolutely nothing to provoke it. (And we all know that would have been swept under the rug were it not for the footage surfacing.)
Edit: and I should add that this assault actually occurred at the Ian Tomlinson vigil. What a thick headed thuggish gods damned moron.
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Lots more about the abduction/super-hinky-arrest video here:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/mindless-neo-cons-claim-g20-abduction-video-is-fake.htmlI don't move in these circles, is prison planet a credible source for this sort of information? They look highly ideologically motivated, but that might mean they spin, or it might mean they fabricate, or it might mean they're completely deluded lunatics.
The comments on that page are pretty horrid, so much posturing. Yuck.