Jonathan's Liverstone

Half-price Gym Membership

The FitnessNZ Gym promotion is a great thing.

FitnessNZ wants to get more Kiwis active. As a part of this, we are subsidising a limited number of memberships for Kiwis who are not a currently members of any fitness centre (and have not been one for the last 12 months). All have been subsidised 50% (based on the normal sell price of the membership, which includes any joining or start up fees).

I got a membership for myself, finally, after having dithered around for far too long; as the mid-region spread is starting to show!
It's simple enough to do through their website, and gets you (me) over the first (financial) hurdle of joining up.
Hat-tip David Farrar

Posted by The Denizen @ 7/26/2006 08:19:00 pm {0 comments }

KasMail

Kasmail Antispam aliases are a great idea:
Most websites require you to register by providing them your email address before you can access their services. Usually this is not a problem, but some sites will sell your personal information, including your email address to other companies for commercial sollicitation. This is when you start receiving SPAM.
Once your email address has been given away, you can't control who has access to it and what it may be used for. Therefore, it is a good idea to give it away only to your contacts, and to use a disposable address to register with various websites you visit.
A disposable email is an address that KasMail creates for you for a set period of time, ranging from a few days to a few years. All the messages sent to the disposable address are automatically forwarded to your regular email address. When you decide that you don't want to use the disposable address anymore, for example if you are receiving too much spam, just make it expire.
Disposable emails are really temporary aliases, and you can have as many as 25 disposable addresses at a given time.

Posted by The Denizen @ 7/22/2006 01:41:00 pm {0 comments }

Weird Wellington Weather

What the hell is it with the weather?
Earlier this week, the wind was so bad that all the recycling ended up at one end of the street.
When I came home last night there were drifts of sleet/hail collecting at the base of all the south facing walls, driven by a vicious southerly.
And this morning; blue skies, sunshine, and as I walked around the suburban shops, everyone is exchanging smiles, and there are old men sitting on the benches, chatting and laughing ... Brilliant.
So what's it gonna do tomorrow?

Posted by The Denizen @ 7/22/2006 11:52:00 am {0 comments }

Latest Earworm

On the firefly platform on sunny Goodge Street
Violent hash-smoker shook a chocolate machine
Bobbed in an eating scene.
Smashing into neon streets in their stillness
Smearing their eyes on the crazy Kali goddess
Listenin' to sounds of Mingus mellow fantastic.
My, my, they sigh.

Posted by The Denizen @ 7/22/2006 11:02:00 am {0 comments }

A Hell download

I finally got around to loading up with FC5 on the weekend (rainy Saturday eh),
but "yum update" certainly made the eyes water on my download cap:
A stop record of 1.11GB download for that night.
(... and it doesn't recognise the DVD drive, bugger.)

Posted by The Denizen @ 7/18/2006 06:54:00 pm {0 comments }

RadioNZ Podcasts

Evenings are getting a nice audio "aura" to them lately.
There's nothing worth watching on the telly, and I have discovered the RNZ Podcast site.
Now I can catch much of the good stuff that I would normally miss through the day.
... on another tack: Have you noticed how Saturday mornings seem to have transformed into "The Kim Hill Arts Show", where she specialises in a parade of writers, actors and such-like. Not the old Kimmy I used to enjoy!

Posted by The Denizen @ 7/16/2006 09:05:00 pm {0 comments }

Gathering a random seed

Perhaps not the most formal or technical description of what is required, but ...
from dailywtf.com

(also from the same discussion ...
Type " javascript:alert(0.1+0.2) " into the browser and see a cute java rounding error.)

Posted by The Denizen @ 7/11/2006 06:53:00 pm {0 comments }

A Fine Saturday.

	After all the rough weather, it was nice to sit & enjoy the sun (and the good things in life) in Days Bay.
	Wellington Harbour: Days Bay Jetty, Seatoun, Kaikouras ... loverly.

Posted by The Denizen @ 7/08/2006 08:23:00 pm {0 comments }

Google History

It's amazing what you trip over when you start wandering around the internet.
This picture is of the original disk storage assembled to house the google server (apparently it was called backrub then). Built while Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still Stanford students, it wasn't de-commissioned until 1999. Whodda thought to build a disk array housing outa Lego blocks!

Posted by The Denizen @ 7/08/2006 08:17:00 pm {0 comments }

The Weather

After the last few days of lousy weather, it was rather ironic to turn the page on my desk diary (beats the standard corporate issue Lotus notes: hands down!) and found the following witty quote on the bottom of the page:
"There is little chance that meteorologists can solve the mysteries of weather until they gain an understanding of the mutual attraction of rain and weekends. -Arnot Sheppard"
Methinks that there are a fair few Wellington mothers musing on the parallel attraction of school holidays and lousy weather.

Posted by The Denizen @ 7/06/2006 10:01:00 pm {0 comments }

Do Not Use

It has been decided that we will NOT be having any fires on the 5th Floor.

Posted by The Denizen @ 7/06/2006 05:58:00 pm {0 comments }

Tinian

Some haunting images of the American experience of the WW2 Pacific War.
Tip: Barista

Posted by The Denizen @ 7/01/2006 08:11:00 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.