Posts by Russell Brown
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
I mentioned upthread that a journalist had contacted me about the Key tax cuts story. It was I Ian Llewellyn and he's happy to be quoted thus:
I see on your blog, you have pondered why a bigger deal was not made by news organisations about Key’s comments on tax cuts benefiting people (by I think) around $300 a month. I tried to scrawl through all the comments, but there is not enough time in the day.
Anyway, just to give you some insight into how this happened in our office.
I was at home by the time the Cullen press release came out about it, but was called up because there was dissent in the office about how to handle it and tax etc is my area.
We checked the quote and its accuracy (It was correct) and looked at the context (which was confusing), we checked out with Key’s office what he meant.
The most interesting point to me was whether he had revealed that National had done some detailed tax policy and Key had let slip some information that pointed to it and following on from this what the policy was.
To cut to the end, the decision I made was that Key was talking about what would be the effect now if National had been elected in 2005 and implemented its tax policy as outlined then… the crucial part of this was the reference to the `If we were in Government’’ or some such like phrase.
The $50/$60 a week was roughly what I recall that package delivering to many people (though of course what is average is a matter of debate, skewed by the fact that many in New Zealand effectively pay no tax whatsoever)
I was assured by one senior Nat that they had got no where near finalising a tax policy. Sure there is plenty of discussion about possibilities, but like most opposition parties they will keep their options open to well into election year and probably the formal campaign before getting anywhere near that.
So after an hour of my time (after I got home) and an hour of another journalist’s time, the decision was made to do nothing because nothing new had been said. In these instances we are loathe to write something because a politician from the opposite side claims scandal.
It is a judgment call and maybe it was wrong, but time will tell.
I just want to assure you that there was not just a simple decision through bias or laziness… John has made a gaffe/slip/revelation let’s ignore it.
There is debate about such issues on a daily basis… what matters? What shall we spend our time on? etc
You would be surprised how much time we spend filtering out claims the sky is falling and in the ever dwindling resources of the media, time is the most rationed item.
Just as an aside I also did a bit of work on the Nats policy towards the mega-meat merger, whether anyone published it I do not know.
Anyway in case you are wondering why I am emailing this instead of blogging, well I am still dubious about the blogging world. The abuse and nastiness on some sites is off-putting and leaves me with no desire to engage.
Your site does tend to have a better level of debate, but some of the assumptions about how the media works does worry me sometime.
For my part, I've been informed by the discussion following this post, and I really appreciate Ian's reply.
-
You can probably do this trick which involves the a single keystroke before you can begin dragging and dropping
Good point. the iMac had Firewire ports really early, so there's a good chance I/O's Mac will have one, and thus be able to go into Fire Target Disk Mode.
But he probably still wants to buy one o' them remarkably cheap USB sticks. Getting the 4GB one changed our whole downloaded-TV viewing experience: you load up some foreign telly on the stick, walk into the lounge, plug it in the PS3 and behave as a citizen of the world ...
-
We used to work, down the mine, week in week out for tuppence a fortnight and when we got home our dad would make us use Netscape.
You were lucky!
-
Sounds like you want to migrate you old files over. Do a search for the "migration assistant" on the new computer.
Nah -- I'm pretty sure the migration assistant (modern marvel that it is) is MacOS X-only. And even if not, it's too late now that I/O has been using his new computer.
My tip: assuming your old Mac has USB ports, obtain a USB drive ($30 for a 4GB one some weeks at PB Technologies!), put the files on that and transfer them that way.
They should open in a new version of Office, but if they don't there are various other apps that will do it - it just might be a bit messy ...
-
While Russell is working out how much he would pay for his 60GB a month habit, he might also work out what a brand new MacBook Air would have set you back ten years ago -- and how it much it would have weighed.
Did you ever set eyes on the Mac Portable?
-
BTW and this is dreadfully off topic, can anyone tell me how the Phoenix Foundation/Lawrence Arabia show at the Zoo went a couple of weeks back?
I gather it was a delight.
-
Richard was the great provider for quite a few of us. He used to come over to my High Street office in the early 90s and sit over coffee explaining the future. He installed my first modem (9600kbs) on my recently upgraded 486 which allowed me to tap into the newsgroups via an Auckland University line. And then came Mosaic.
It was Richard who answered my phone call for help when I first logged in on my Iconz shell account. You didn't get any instructions back then -- he explained to me that I had to type "pine" to reach my email ... not something you'd just guess, really.
It was Richard too that arranged for Flying Nun and us to jointly source and pay for an edition of Office, which we installed in both offices. The only downside was having to say "This is Mr. Shepherd" when ringing for support.
LOL.
-
I remember Richard Ram. Whatever became of him? Do you know Russell?
He's working for Shift in Auckland. I went to the rugby with him t'other week. He remains a man of mystery ...
-
Oh I didn't mean the torrenting. When I get home I'll start downloading Ducks vs Blackhawks from last night. It's the figuring out your current usage in 1995 costings that was more of a concern.
It's not hard like, say, costing tax cuts. Just 60,000MB at $10 a megabyte ...
-
Eh? Is this true? I know nothing about Macs (I just bought one and it ... heh heh .. worked) but I was reliably informed (or ...not!) that Firefox was better than Safari so I've been using that since I bought my new Intel chip OSX Tiger (Leopard's the new one right? Mine is 10.4.11). Seems to work fine, but if you think I should go back to Safari??
If you're on 10.4, you can now download Safari 3.0 (it ships with 10.5), although it seems a little less stable on 10.4.
It's bloody fast and I prefer the way it handles RSS feeds to the way Firefox does it. But probably its loveliest feature is the way it displays PDF files -- you have to see it to really grasp it, but it kicks the butt of every other browser in that respect.
One feature which looks cool but hasn't turned out to be much use to me is that you can select part of a page and have it display, live, in Dashboard. If you were watching an auction or live stock prices or something I imagine it would be great.
The main problem (although it's hardly unique this) is that especially if you're power-using and opening 50 tabs in a session, it's a resource hog. I probably have to force-quit it 50% of the time, because it doesn't like quitting itself.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 … 2279 Older→ First