Posts by Dave Patrick
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I just have one plea for Sean Plunkett - can he please stop saying "All right" after everything anyone else says, and before he asks his next question? It's really beginning to grate.....
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OT but urgent-ish.
Could any Christchurch readers within reach of one of those "Zero tolerence [sic] for crime" Act billboards do me a favour and grab a photograph for me? And email it to me?
Ta.
The Emmisions ones (or at at least the ones I drive past on the way to work) have all been corrected with yellow "Emissions" stickers - it's a pretty good job, you can hardly tell they've replaced an ineptly-spelt word.
I'll keep an eye out for a "Tolerence" one on the way home tonight.
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Speaking of rugby jerseys, I think it was Racing Club de France in Paris who had the powder-blue jerseys with the fold-over collar and the little bow-tie at the throat - now they were classy with a capital C
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Stade Francais have created what may be one of the worst uniforms ever
Oh........ my......... god..........
And no way does Auckland deserve to be in the quarters - they couldn't even beat Counties (sorry, Coooouuuuunnnnnnttttttttiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeessssss)
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Searching for the same unit as that guy's offering, I can find it for 250 Australian, and around 70 pounds. $700 is ridiculous, even the starting point of 350 gives the guy a reasonable return.
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I have about 40 sides done.
I use Audacity. Typically I record the file using maximum bits and sample rate, chop silence from the beginnings and ends and run "Normalise" to set the levels correctly. I'm using a Technics SL-1200, a Pioneer DJM-600 mixer and a Hercules DJ-Console soundcard. I have the trim control marked with a position that keeps the level out of clipping and all tone controls at 0db.
I don't use any kind of filter/effect apart from that, but most of my music is on 12" singles, which are much higher quality than 80's albums (I'm talking pressings here, not musical talent...).
I've looked at Audacity before, and a program called Magix Audio Cleaning which is pretty good (but costs actual money, which I may have to pay one day...) - it handles the sound capture as well as a range of infinitely-tweakable fixy-uppy bits and pieces (which I haven't used either, apart from the hum-removal). How much of a problem is hum in your setup?
A lot of my vinyl has seen better days so needs some serious cleaning. Especially so for the shitty late-80s "how thin can we make a piece of vinyl before it snaps under the weight of the stylus and anyway everyone's buying CDs so who cares" pressings.
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BTW - has anyone found a workabel way to rip vinyl to MP3?
Yep, install Soulseek and grab a decent digital copy of all your vinyl tunes. Trust me, it may eat some bandwidth but it'll save you a whole load of pain and suffering. And it's kind of legit as you already own the songs.
Or alternatively the hard way, which involves running a cable either from the TAPE-2 output on the back of your amp, or straight from the headphone jack on the front, to the LINE-IN port on your computer, running something like AudioGrabber to record the LINE-IN sound to a wav file, using something like WavePad or PolderbitS to clean the sound up and slice it in to songs, then converting the wav files to mp3. This is my latest project, which I have been pursuing now for a few months. I'm up to "B" so far....
Soulseek or those naughty Scandinavians works fine for more popular or well-known stuff, but obscure New Zealand releases it doesn't handle too well at all - I've yet to see my Stridulators 7" single on Soulseek, or the Tunnellers, or Vietnam, WSSOES, even more popular examples like Blam Blam Blam and Netherworld Dancing Toys.
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Book suggestions from PA readers gratefully accepted too
Try the classics - Moomintrolls, Swallows and Amazons are two I can think of off the top of my head. I'd say the Hobbit too, but some bits of that can be a bit scary. Chronicles of Narnia maybe?
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This again is an old one, but it's led to us always using the same plumber whenever we need any work done - and it's about a plumber, a much-maligned breed nowadays, so it sort of evens up their balance sheet a bit hopefully.
We moved house on a Friday (much less stressful than a Saturday - lawyers aren't busy on Thursdays, removal vans have whole fleets available) - cleared out the old by about 12, and were all moved in nearly by about 3. We'd arranged a plumber to come round and move the laundry tub out of the sun-drenched northerly facing ranchslidered current laundry into the garage, so we could use the sunniest room in the house as an office. He arrived on time at about 4pm, had the tub unplumbed and the pipes sealed off pretty quickly.
Then - "Oh" he said, "You were hoping to plumb the washing machine and tub into the waste pipe running from the bathroom?" (which backed on to the garage).
"Yes" we said "Is there a problem?"
"Yep" he said " laundries need a <some size of waste pipe> and the bathroom waste pipe is only <some smaller size>. But I can fix that, no problem, it'll only take an hour or so." He spent over an hour, sawing a very neat channel in the gib board to run the new pipe behind, replacing the sawn-out bit of gib, knocking out bricks to run the pipe to the waste flow and generally making an awesome job of the whole thing. At about 5:30 he said "I've nearly finished, so I might as well carry on - don't want to leave you without a laundry for the weekend".
He eventually finished at about 6:30 - on a Friday. He even swept up the dust he'd left in the old laundry and the dust he'd created in the garage when he cut the gib board. Truly excellent service which we have always remembered.
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And Stephen Donald is from Waiuku, who knew? Not my ladyfriend who was taught history by his Dad.
"Incredibly small world" time again - I was also taught by his Dad, who was a pretty handy fullback for Waiuku in his day, and almost made the Counties team at one stage. I'm only guessing here, but his Dad must have been teaching at Waiuku College for quite a while if he taught your ladyfriend as well as me (me being old and all).