Posts by JackElder
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Finding comments from Jack who I used to flat with while people pranked called the Minister of Police, on a blog post about the magazine published by a woman who I once played in a band with, it all points to the same honest truth - Wellington, indeed New Zealand, really is a very small place.
Hi Scott!
I'd say that it's the world that's a smaller place than you'd think. As mentioned, I actually ran into Suraya in the UK because she turned up at the same parties I did, where I was there because it was a workmate's partner's flat, and she was there because said partner had had an ex-flatmate who'd since moved to Wellington and so a separate ex-flatmate knew my mate's partner, and that guy knew Suraya from some odd connection involving latex (I never got to the bottom of that - to be fair, I was quite drunk at the time). Serious double-take when we opened the door to see her, though, having last seen her at a party in the Aro Valley (I'm beginning to see a connection).
But this sort of thing used to happen a surprising amount, even overseas: I'd be at a ball in Cambridge, and run into a bloke I'd known in 7th form at Wellington College, that sort of thing. Like I say, it's a smaller world than you'd expect.
My 'hilarious mispronunciation' story relates to the time I was getting a round in at a pub. I made a fairly basic mis-assumption around the etymology of the name of the beer, and ended up ordering a pint of "bom-bar-dee-eh", on the assumption that it was the French pronunciation rather than the actual pronunciation (Bombardier). I was drinking with my workmates at the time: that's how you get nicknames, folks.
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Everyone lies, man.
Good divisive word: "moist". People either think it's sexy or revolting.
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2nd disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been, a cabinet minister. Though I did used to get his crank calls back in the 90s when I was a student (he had an unlisted number, I didn't = late night calls from drunk people wanting to annoy the minister of police).
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Disclaimer: I am not, nor have I ever been, a model in this magazine. I'm more just confirming that I would have been if I'd been asked. ;) The gay German porn site thing is true, though, but it's totally unrelated. Actually, it was a piercing fetish website run by a group of German guys, so I'm not sure you'd really call it porn, but the story sounds better that way.
Frankly, I am not the typical phenotype for models from this publication. I'd be a bit more suited to appearing in publications with titles like "Big and Beardie" or "Long-Haired Hippy Layabouts".
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Actually, I'm pretty sure that the last time I saw Suraya in the flesh was at a party where the person she came with ended up taking pictures of my nipples. I seem to recall consenting provided I got a few bob when the pictures inevitably ended up on the internet. This was in the aftermath of my brief history as an (inadvertant) model on a german gay porn website, and I was determined that while I didn't mind this sort of thing happening, I at least wanted to make a couple of bucks off it.
Disclaimer: I went to uni with Suraya. Though we did run into her at parties in the UK, based on mutual (English) friends-of-friends, proving that there is some odd flocking behaviour going on all over the place.
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Just a few days ago we were driving along a downtown Auckland street and I saw a billboard that said "TAKE YOUR KIDS TO BRISNEYLAND!"
Yes, I laughed like a drain when I saw that one.
and I turned to Paul and said "Not many Jews in NZ eh?"
Well, Wellington supports not one, but two klezmer bands - draw your own conclusions.
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If it's austerity, then surely it's more likely to be fish and chip?
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The Big Lebowski is a parody of The Big Sleep. The Dude is what would have happened if Humphry Bogart lived in the 60s.
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I've got more of a marketing question. Is it called "XT" because it is (in some undefined way) half of xtra? Or is it a homage to the famous mountain bike groupset from Shimano?
(Yes, I know it's probably just meant to be "a more mobile version of Xtra". But trust me, it's hilarious if you're a mountain biker).
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My experience as tech support at A University in the '90s was that there were several professors who fought tooth and nail to prevent their IT being upgraded, 'cos they'd spent huge amounts of time writing WordPerfect macros and didn't want to lose the work.
OTOH, my experience around various parts of the civil service left me thinking that a lot of "standard" users barely scratch the surface of their PCs. For example, I'm pretty sure that Word 98 met the word-crunching needs of 99% of users in most places I've worked. Ditto the comments made about thin client applications; if you're working through a browser anyway, why should it particularly matter which OS you're looking at it in?
Agree about the change to Word 2007 - my mum got it on her home PC and asked me for support. Why go breaking a reasonably well established UI? Mainly, I suspect, because if it didn't look 'sleeker' it wouldn't sell any new copies.
Most applications will have that sort of 3-year churn built in, and the average lifespan of a custom in-house application would be about, what, 6 years? Even if you stick with MS, you're going to have to budget for systems replacement/retraining periodically, why not do it in the way that avoids a licensing fee on top?
Hell, if nothing else, making a serious investigation of F/OSS alternatives to MS is a good way to convince MS to knock a few bob off the license fees. ;)