Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Craig Ranapia,
In Espedair Street Iain Banks has his musician character produce an inflammatory record, which is ritually burnt across the southern US. The character suggests to his record company that they produce a special pressing with fireworks incorporated in the vinyl for the benefit of these people.
Maybe Craig Potton could follow suit and make a special immolation edition for those wanting to spend their money.
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Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Dismal Soyanz,
Last few elections, I think. But you only get that if you have registered.
If you're a young person and moving around, and haven't checked your mail and sent the form off, you won't get one. That's the problem.
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Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Stephen Judd,
The system is a bit misconceived.
The basic requirement to vote is that you are an NZ citizen or permanent resident, not a convicted prisoner, and you (if outside NZ) haven't been away for more than a certain time.
If you turn up at a polling place, the latter part of that is obvious and it just comes down to asserting your residence status and address (to determine which electorate you are in).
That could all be done from the databases of Internal Affairs and NZIS (with backup from IRD and LTSA). There is no actual need to maintain an electoral roll of where everyone lives. For those that refuse to carry id, they could sign a statutory declaration.
Quickvote cards could also be mailed out as currently for everyone where the EC has a known address, making voting simple: go to any polling place, show either quickvote card, id or sign a declaration and vote.
[And as Emma points out, voting like this is allowed now. All that's needed is to build some smarts into the system so that the exceptional becomes normal. Which is the correct use of IT in voting, not online or electronic ballots]
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Hard News: Never mind the quality ..., in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
I expect they'll be calling Allan Titford or Graham Capill to see if they're available. Are prisoners allowed to write for newspapers?
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Hard News: We can do better than this, in reply to Bart Janssen,
s/Fijians/Americans
s/rugby/warThere, I fixed it.
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Hard News: We can do better than this, in reply to stephen clover,
There are such things as RSS feeds and crawlers.
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127.0.0.1 www.kiwiblog.co.nz
127.0.0.1 www.whaleoil.co.nzPut these lines in your /etc/hosts file and you'll never look back.
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Hard News: We can do better than this, in reply to llew40,
I guess awards might have their uses, but I don't think they're a great loss if they don't happen. In general, great work speaks for itself and doesn't need approbation to back it up.
(I may be a bit jaundiced, because in my profession the award generally gets collected by some marketing droid who mostly contributed to the project's delays and frustrations, whilst the coders who actually did the work don't get as much as a credit).
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Hard News: We can do better than this, in reply to Robyn Gallagher,
In that time the only PR offer I've had was to write about a well known brand of baked beans in exchange for one (1) can of the baked beans.
There's ligging out there if you're prepared to hassle for it though, and kudos for not doing so. SWIM who works in online marketing knows of a bunch of little gigs that'll get you money or freebies. Nothing particularly evil either, restaurant reviews, tweets, that sort of thing. No big secret, really.
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Hard News: We can do better than this, in reply to llew40,
whether or not next years sponsorship is worth it - which would be a terrible industry outcome
Why? Because people miss out on some free booze and a backslapping opportunity?