Posts by Paul Campbell
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I think the couch burning thing will eventually die a natural death .... unless someone starts importing a supply from elsewhere the second hand stores will run out and future generations will sit on the floor
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(disclaimer: I'm now one of those 'stodgy' Dunedinites ... and I'm married to a student ... I suspect this is all terribly overblown)
We are talking about two relatively disparate worlds here - namely the letters to the editor pages of the ODT and Critic - most non-uni people probably never see a Critic (they don't even show up in cafes down town) - the rest of the city probably doesn't even know there's an issue because they only see one side - and the ODT's pages are full of odes to how wonderfull our new stadium might be (I've yet to meet a real person who's actually in favour of it).
Let's face it people burning stuff in the street and picking fights with the cops makes good front page copy - with real pictures rather than the sadly staged fare the ODT usually provides us with (like the guy yesterday pretending he's suprised about the value of his pottery).
I moved back from the US about 2 years ago - we arrived the week after exams just after the end-of-year and rented a cheap motel in the student area while we looked for somewhere to live ... the streets were paved in glass that week - looked like a bomb had gone off, or like I once saw in Frankfurt the day after Germany had won the world cup ... we started to have second thoughts .... but all was well a week later ...
This is still a city that publishes ALL the court news and we still read it (if only to see who we know who might be in it) ... a good public shaming probably still goes a long way here ... granny might find out .... it also means we read all the students-were-drunk-and-disorderly-and-stole-a-policeman's-hat or equivalent stories writ in those columns
Personally I don't mind a street party just clean up when you're done and make sure your neighbours get some sleep - let the cops know what you're doing, invite them along, give them a beer
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honestly anyone trying to 'unify the left' is blowing smoke - every left wing political coalition I've ever been involved with - even the really successfull ones have turned on each other either when they're not doing well - or after they've done really well and don;t have anything better to do .... and honestly I see the American right about to do the same thing to itself, probably for many of the same reasons .... I think it's just human nature
Try and make any large coallition anywhere in the political spectrum and I bet people at one end will start to try and convert people at the other - that's always going to get people annoyed (just look at the nats and the bretheren, .... there's a marriage of convenience that could never last, .... or the Alliance ....)
Maybe one of the good things about proportional representation is that parties can get small enough that they can live with each other .... at least for a while ....
This is not to say I haven't been glad to be involved in every one of those lefty groups over the years - standing up and speaking your mind is always better than sitting on your hands and moaning
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well I'm also in the Linux-only house boat - I seem to get a you-tube clone under konq - dinky flash player, no full screen - no obvious place to download drm-crippled stuff (am I missing something obvious or are they just hiding it from me?)
mind you thanks to our wonderfull nationwide internet backbone I can't actually get enough bandwidth to keep even that fed well enough to be usefull (and no way to download stuff in the background)
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Actually the thing that really brought home the "I'm getting old meme" was last week when I discovered I have litterally become history .... at lunch time I got excited texts from my son who had been watching video from the '81 tour and wanted to when and where I'd gotten arrested ... he was sure he'd seen me and/or my brother .... for me it was one of those coming-of-age events and now he's almost there .... I wonder what he'll do?
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sigh, I am getting old .... I guess they're not upstairs at the Cook any more either are they
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I should add that here in Dunedin we have an ideal infrastructure for fibre-to-the-curb for much of the city - the old, now unused coal-gas mains - or we would except that apparently the city sold them to Telecom for 1$ a while ago (probably so that Telstra would get them) - AFAIK they're not being used except for maybe downtown a bit - time for a bit of eminent domain to get them back (for $1!) and actually starting to use them
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Well Rod's blog silently swallows my postings so I guess I'll have to vent here ....
I completely agree with Rod - like a slowly growing number of people I live in NZ and work elsewhere (in the US) - I'm an exporter, I export my labour (don't get me started on exchange rates ....) - I live on California time and go to work 'on the net' - the pay is good but the hours suck, especially in the winter. I depend on being able to log into the machines at work, and VOIP (I have a US phone number that answers in NZ)
From my point of view there are four issues
- the least important, to me anyway, is 1) bandwidth - I just have to pay the $$$ to get the Gb/month I need, cheaper would be nicer but I can survive
- more important to me are 2) reliability/redundancy, I live in Dunedin and a one guy backhoe can (in fact has) stop me earning instantly - (and make me look like a backwoods rube in front of my coworkers)
- and 3) short term congestion - we seem to suffer bouts of dropped packets where stuff just goes away - if you've called into a meeting via VOIP and the upstream starts to garble people just turn you off - instant marginalisation
- and most important 4) latency - I know there's not much I can do with the speed of light across the pacific (~130mS) - but it looks like I'm losing 40-50mS inside of Telecom's ATM - this means that the VOIP I use day to day sucks just a little bit worse - logging into work my keystrokes slow, I'm just that little bit less productive - having my ISP put local routers in my local exchange would probably fix a lot of this. Sure latency is something that gamers usually seem to care about but there's lots of the rest of us who feel its bite every day
Finally I think there IS already just the network that Rod's talking about, govt funded even ..... at least something to build a greater infrastructure on - the new University net is I understand being built on existing dark fibre and would probably make a great start for just this sort of expansion - in fact I get the impression that its powers-that-be may already have such plans ....
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A little background - while doing a trade show I once found myself taking the offramp that ends up becoming that scene - in real life it's a boringly pedantic city street scene usually devoid of the people we see in the film and seemed 'browner' (I suspect they hadn't kept up the lawns over the years) - and yet suddenly you're in that scene we've all seen from the film
Down town Dallas is a bit weird no one actually seems to live there - at 5 the streets fill, people get on buses and it's empty again by 6. Sunday is down-right sureall - people come in all dressed for church - the sidewalks outside the churches are patrolled by security people with police-looking uniforms but with cross-emblems in place of badges who eye you like a potential mass murder, (at least they do if you're like me bored, dressed in jeans and wandering the streets waiting for your trade show to start).
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Oh yeah - and make sure you try some of the local flaky paratha .... mmmm yum