Posts by TracyMac
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To answer Jolisa's question, I can't vouch for the buggy whip makers, but there are definitely _stock whip_ makers in Australia who have a "secondary line" in other interesting items. There was even one selling some less overt items (wrist cuffs and the like) next to his handtooled belts at the last Murrumbateman Field Day (Murrumbateman is like the Canberran version of Kumeu 10 years ago. Tichy, on the highway to somewhere else, but some wineries scattered around the area and a cafe or two to eat at).
As for local news in non-printed media, I think outfits like _The Stranger_ do a good job. For an alternative mag that was just about local Seattle news, they've made a pretty graceful transition to their online presence (although the printed mag still has different content). And they also have Dan Savage.
Community papers have always done better when there has been some good editorial vision - like Pat Booth in whatever local rag it was. I can see that kind of thing evolving in an online presence as well - smaller scale Arianna Huffingtons, perhaps.
As for newspaper delivery, I'm afraid I don't have fond memories of waking up at 4:30am to deliver 200 papers (it was the Courier) before 7 in the middle of winter for $4.20. That wasn't much even in 1983. One older lady gave me fruit occasionally, and another one gave me a hot pie. That was pretty much it for the positives.
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I like the redesign of the Stuff site, in the main, but yeah, too much with the white space. It could be reduced by 30-50% between all the elements, and still provide enough "cleanness", I think.
Also, why are people making menu bars so fat these days? What looks like the full width of the text all round is just a bit excessive.
I do like the fact that no-one's assumed I have a stonking wide-screen monitor, nor conversely do I own some 640x480 jobbie from 1994. Can't tell if it's fixed-width yet, but it works great on my 1024x768 laptop. Also, yay for a decent text size by default and the text size + tool.
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...leather on Willow...
Yessss, my precious, we likes it. You keep nasty cricket.
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I think the MDMA-chugging cyclists with whatever suitable special effects and sounds are a fantastic idea for revitalising the tourism industry. I would quite like to be one of the cyclists myself.
As for casinos, I visit with my mum. It's once a year we can do something together that we both kind of enjoy. She likes the pokies - I think they're vile, but really not that much viler (in the normal run of things) than arcade gaming machines (which I frequent more, er, frequently, it must be said). How often do you see the young dudes playing those games crack a smile? DDR is something else, of course. At the casino, I play Texas Hold-Em or blackjack. I might lose $50 or so, but it's not bad for a few hours of entertainment.
The one advantage about using casinos to trap the kinds of people who gamble pathologically is that the support services are more available to them. ...I'm somewhat reminding myself of the gay bath-houses in the US during the 80s that remained open despite the onslaught of the AIDS epidemic, with the excuse that it was easier to "supervise" safe sex practices. But still. Casinos do advertise the helplines, they pay some of their proceeds to the appropriate organisations, and they get taxed.
None of these things are true of the backroom poker games that my stepfather attended religiously in throughout the 70s, and where the odds were even as to whether he'd actually come home with enough of a paycheck to pay for the weekly groceries. There were games with thousand-dollar pots, which were not too shabby at that time for a man who made a "living" driving rubbish trucks and digging roads. So perhaps if casinos had been around, they would have enabled his addiction more. But perhaps there would have been more avenues of addressing it as well.
But I completely agree that the hypocrisy surrounding legal addictions is ridiculous. I tend to put compulsive gambling in the crack cocaine/P realm myself, due to the impact they have on others. But for the milder drugs? Waste of time and money.
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Mmmm, of course, all the other major browsers are developing new and improved Javascript engines as well.
As for Chrome, maybe I'll give it another go on my home machine, although it's useless in the enterprise - it doesn't remember how to log onto a proxy between sessions, for a start. Also, not having extensions means no ad-blocker. I'm afraid that's a must these days (except for well-behaved sites like PA). Nice interface, except the compulsory anchor underlines drives me nuts.
I've never experienced any lag opening Firefox, though. I'm pretty selective with the add-ons. Delicious bookmarks, Gmail Manager, Download Statusbar, the Aussie dictionary and Adblock Plus.
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Hm, but normally a NATed network will have internal IP address allocations (192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x), and some kind of proxy that will allow the administrators to determine which IP downloaded what content at a specific time.
In addition, any network that requires you to logon to the workstation will have a record of who was using that IP at that time (not to mention proxies that you also logon to, whether transparently or not).
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Leaving aside all the very worthy discussions right now, can I just say those Cab Voltaire Kora remixes are fantastic.
Must get my hands on it.
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And indeed: if I could read science-fiction novels like you'd eat fistfuls of popcorn and still not expect to be serving on a spaceship next to impossibly handsome incredibly intelligent delightfully emotionally-retarded men, why shouldn't the same be true for the girls reading the pink books?
Not wanting to get too reductionist about it, a lot of it is simple sexism. A lot of old skool sci-fi was (and is) all about men caressing their big weapons, and talking about muzzle velocity and fire rates ad nauseum. At least the girlie stuff was more honest about the porn factor. But apparently (predominantly male) techno-porn is more acceptable than (predominantly female) emo-porn.
Why is it easier to say that while there is a lot of cheezy McCheeze in sci-fi, we can point to the "classics" and say that there is plenty of good literature in there as well? Why is it so difficult to admit that novels like Wuthering Heights are also simply good examples of their genre (romance)?
(Actually, I hate Wuthering Heights. Give me a good Nora Roberts any day. Although I do prefer Lois McMaster Bujold.)
As for people saying that some women have an unnatural perception about reality after reading romances, they should attend a science fiction convention one day (ok, 99% of people are dressing up to have fun, but there are some...)
It is changing - more women are writing and reading sci-fi, and sometimes, OMG, you actually get character development. On the other hand, more women - and feminist women, and men - are coming out about their romance reading preferences, and are getting quite stroppy about getting the appropriate respect for the good stuff.
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For reference, no need to use horrible diaresis (umlauts) instead of macrons in HTML documents (and I don't know why so many university and govt web pages still seem to be incapable of getting it right):
Ā Ā ā ā
Ē Ē ē ē
Ī Ī ī ī
Ō Ō ō ō
Ū Ū ū ūWell, ok, it's not going to work if you're stuck with a ISO-8859-1 character set, but all the modern OSes support Unicode/UTF-8 (Windows since NT4 and by default in XP), Macs caught up with 10.2, and Linux is fine if you use TrueType or the DejaVu fonts (and plenty of others).
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If people feel that another country offers them what they want in terms of variety of work, cheap drugs, wider range of fellow perverts, warm beer or a range of lethal fauna, then why shouldn't they live there?
Too true. Funnily enough, though, I've found the acceptance-of-perverts thing has done a bit of a 180 when we compare NZ and its biggest neighbour to how it was 15-20 years ago.
I think so much Howard small-mindedness has a lot to answer for. And on the other side, Labour/Green liberal social policies.
After a recent relationship breakup, I've got nothing particularly holding me here in Oz. However, I've just put up with 4 years of political conservatism here, and I don't fancy going back home to Key and his cronies.
I was last in NZ (in Wgtn) for 18 months after spending nearly 5 years in London... and it was like I could breathe. Scenery, OMG. Clubs playing cool dance music where I wasn't the oldest person. Cocktails. A awareness of trends and suchlike, without seemingly being enslaved to them. A more laid-back atmosphere in general - people actually greeting you in the shops.
Those people talking about NZ's violent culture obviously haven't lived in Oz (bikies are thick on the ground in Canberra, not to mention the weekly shoot-outs in Sydney), nor London. As for racism, yes, that is pretty endemic, but I think it's about average for a racially-diverse population, with the various components living in close proximity. Places with low overt racism seem to be the most white-bread, in my experience. And at least efforts to give the appropriate prominence to many of NZ's cultures go beyond pure tokenism (even if balanced representation is far from being achieved).
What I miss about England is the cultural richness right there. I travelled back for a few weeks earlier this year to just literally hit the museums, listen to great music, stuff myself at the Borough Market, buy kilos (literally) of books, and drink organic cider in Wales. And yes, being able to jaunt around Europe in an hour or so, or by train - just fantastic. Coffee's still a lot better in NZ, though.