Jonathan's Liverstone

Charades

I'm afraid this just appealed to my warped sense of humour.

Posted by The Denizen @ 9/30/2005 10:00:00 pm {4 comments }

Kapai Kai

And another thing about Tokoroa ...
Albericos Italian Restaurant is *still* the finest.

You can't get a better pizza anywhere in New Zealand.

Posted by The Denizen @ 9/30/2005 09:36:00 pm {0 comments }

Not to be repeated on dialup

I spent the last week in Tokoroa, and took the camera for a walk by Lake Moana-nui at the back of the town.

Uploading the raw photo from the camera (2.1Mb) to blogger created a considerable pause in the evening ...
fortunately the final image file on blogger has been reduced to 170Kb, so it's not so painful to *down*load.

Posted by The Denizen @ 9/30/2005 09:02:00 pm {0 comments }

All those trees

The friday edition of the local evening paper turned up, and as usual I dissected it to remove all the bits that I didn't want.
First up:
The "Property Guide" section ... a whole 96 pages!
That accounted for over half the weight of the paper, and I seriously wonder how many people are *actually* intersted inreading any of it. It seems just a criminal waste of newsprint.
Next up: The "motoring Guide", about half the remainder of the paper.
Which left a pretty sad little specimen of publishing charading as the evening paper.

It (the Friday edition) seems to be suffering the provincial evening papers' disease of having to compete with it's own Saturday edition for news. The publishers (in their wisdom) have converted the Saturday edition to a *morning* paper. So, how much reportable news is going to occur between the Friday evening edition, and the Saturday morning edition.
What happens is that the news gets divided up Friday night, with the stuff that won't go stale being consigned to the Saturday edition.
The Friday paper is pumped up with Property & Motoring guides, and the Saturday edition gets a whole bunch of "magazine" and commentatory, or "opinion columns" to make it seem a more meaty "lifestyle" paper.
Its all a waste of time, but I really like to get the paper to know what's happening in MY district.
Maybe there is a case for a subscription where you can get the basic paper WITHOUT all the commercial advertising supplements which pretend to be newspaper sections.
... at a premium subscription rate of course, but I think I would be willing to pay to NOT recieve all that junk, and save a few trees.

Posted by The Denizen @ 9/30/2005 08:42:00 pm {0 comments }

Cool Button

I made this on some web-site, then lost the URL ...

... just the thing for creating a link to this blog ...
hint hint.
UPDATE:
Brilliant Button Maker

Posted by The Denizen @ 9/30/2005 02:17:00 pm {0 comments }

The first packets

On Oct. 20, 1969, the Interface Message Processor, which worked as the world's first packet-switching router, communicated with a computer at UCLA, seven weeks after they were first connected.

On that October day, the UCLA computer managed to send exactly two characters across the connection to a second computer at Stanford before the entire system crashed under the strain. The two successfully transmitted characters were the letters L and O ; which some have gleefully dubbed the first Netspeak contraction for "hello."

The UCLA team actually intended to spell out the word LOG, which the Stanford system would recognize and then complete as the command LOGIN. (A second attempt made later that day was more successful.)

Posted by The Denizen @ 9/30/2005 01:48:00 pm {0 comments }

Damn! ... missed it!

"At 01:58:31 UTC on March 18, 2005, exactly 1111111111 seconds had passed since the dawn of the Unix epoch at 00:00 UTC January 1, 1970."

...and if you thought the hype about Y2K was over ...

"At 03:14:08 UTC on January 19, 2038 (+231), a 32-bit signed integer representation of Unix time will overflow. Systems using a 32-bit signed integer Unix time_t will therefore be unable to represent that time, or any later, and will likely wrap around to 20:45:52 UTC on December 13, 1901, with integer value -231. This is known as the year 2038 problem."

wikipedia

Posted by The Denizen @ 9/30/2005 01:23:00 pm {0 comments }

Who's Next

I was amused by this
and I wondered if the author even knew that some legends will never die.

Posted by The Denizen @ 9/15/2005 09:48:00 pm {0 comments }

Why did I do it?

I had to cast an early vote, and ...
It is looking like it is going to be a close run thing between the two main parties, and I can not stomach the fact that the National Party was operating like a policy free zone and behaving like a bunch of thieves, swooping on the revenue surplus and divvying it up like pirate's booty.
I prefer the concept of using the fruits of the strong economy to provide benefit for the future, so it should be directed to where it is needed.
The idea of voting Labour is obviously therefore attractive, but if the Greens don't make it, then Labour will have to talk to Winston ... and we REALLY don't want that!
A party vote for either the Progressives or Peter Dunne's mob is a wasted vote,
So, in order to support a Labour-led government, but to keep the buggers in check ...

... besides, when you look at their policies, they aren't *really* that far out!

Posted by The Denizen @ 9/15/2005 09:12:00 pm {0 comments }

The "other blog".

I have recently realised that I have another blog!
It only has one reader, and I publish it in my head, when I am driving, or eating or ... other stuff.
Some of those posts are excellent.
Anyway only a few of those posts ever make it to this blog, sorry.

Posted by The Denizen @ 9/15/2005 03:21:00 pm {0 comments }

Constant Reference

Even constants are on the move.
So you can use the "right" value for the speed of light, or Avogadro ... they are all authoritatively on-line at the NIST Reference of Constants, Units, and Uncertainty
... just thought you should know.

(Afterthought: Perhaps it would profit some journalists to read about uncertainty inview of the rabid interpretation of the excess of voter polls which have been mis-interpreted during the election.)

Posted by The Denizen @ 9/15/2005 03:13:00 pm {0 comments }

Disclaimer: (I stole this from Internal Affairs.)
All links and references to other websites, organisations or people not within my control are provided for the user's convenience only, and should not be taken as endorsement of those websites, or of the information contained in those websites, nor of organisations or people referred to. I also do not implicitly or impliedly endorse any website, organisation or people who have off-site links to this website.
... But then again; I only link to sites 'cos I see something there that's worth linking to.