Posts by Paul Campbell
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*Sigh* - you just published - now there's a whole bunch of places you can't patent it ....
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I'm also on the reimbursement is OK provided it's done promptly camp - Anderton had a good point today when he pointed out that so long as things were settled quickly the govt got the money before they see the Visa bill.
Resolving stuff at the hotel desk as you check out would be insane especially of you're paying for the 10 people in your party (who ordered the peanuts from the mini-bar?).
I travel a lot for work and I do the opposite - run everything through my private credit card then expense it - corporate cards are actually a bad idea for employees (as often if the company goes under and doesn't pay the bills you're stuck with them .... a friend was stuck with $50k once) - better to manage the payment yourself
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heh - Battlefield Earth was my first thought too - no cult should make their own hero's movies for them, it just ends up too embarrassing
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Yeah tell us about it ....
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I think Jack was referring to me and I was talking about the red headed people being shot in the desert in the MIA video ...
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I do see kids continually using "ginga" as a put down - it's based on their genetic make up, how is that different from skin colour? sure it's 'all in fun', if you're not the one continually being made fun of - I think we probably currently have a generation of bullied and tormented red haired kids - and no one, no matter what the colour of their skin or their hair, deserves that, especially as a kid.
OTOH I do think the MIA video is useful - not because they're red haired kids but because they look like us (well us pakeha) - we've had a century of holocausts, Armenia, Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda, .... this is what it looks like when they come for us ....
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My teenage (and nominally Jewish) son couldn't see anything wrong with "hug a ginga day" - until we pointed out that "hug a kike day" or "hug a coconut day" would be just as offensive
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Anyone else remember the introduction of colour TV - they advertised it by showing the cricket ... not because cricket was so compelling but because it was so green.
(puts on TV geek engineer hat)
One of the problems with the the way that the colour information was dropped into the black and white signal to create PAL (and the US/Japan NTSC) - basically they stole a little piece of the signal that doesn't get used much, mostly for things that change quickly horizontally across the screen - that's why 'busy' things like checked ties, paisley, houndstooth jackets, stripes etc etc all disappeared from popular fashion replaced with large solid colours (think about the 80s ....) mostly because they looked better on TV .
The US of course chose their colour system, NTSC (sometimes "never twice the same colour") earlier than the rest of the world and for a bunch of reasons had less bandwidth to work with - this means it couldn't represent the same colour range that our system does - in particular they couldn't show that green grass - nor those saturated colours that NZ ads are full of, not only does the sound jump up on our ads so does the colour.
Digital TV has its own problems - it's based on the same YUV colour space that our PAL is - the americans find HDTV much more compelling than we do because of all the bright colours they've never seen before - sadly the digital MPEG standard retains a lot of history, in particular 'gamma correction' - something we originally got so that our black and white vacuum tube TVs could be made cheaply - a non-linearity in the TV's CRT tubes was corrected back at the studio - we still have it and it's combination with the 8-bit YUV colour space means that most of the colour codes used to represent colour are used for bright saturated colours and very few are available for dim dark colours - you see this in noir - look at Blade Runner some time (the original DVD, not the 'remastered for DVD') those great scenes in the dark, full of drifting curls of smoke, the image breaks up into blocky artifacts because there just isn't the subtlety available in the colour space. Just like fashion changed with the artifacts of colour TV I expect movies will change, directors will avoid things that don't work well on DVD or digital TV, they depend on for downstream revenue - lots of bright colours are in our future, not so much noir
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Many years ago I lived out by the beach - the cat would come walking with me along the beach in the evenings - not like a dog though, she would slink through the dunes keeping pace with me as I walked, I guess all that water was just too scary
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we have a lovely piece of native bush in our front yard - lots of birds, tūī, kererū, bellbirds, fantails .... so we belled the cat as a kitten, she's managed to bring home only one bird so far, the smallest waxeye I've ever seen, might have fallen out of a nest.
In the back yard we have a great walnut tree, in the winter without it's leaves it's a fractal wonder and the cat can move around it in the fractal dimensions up and down to get from place to place - she just doesn't seem understand that the birds are out of this world and can more around the tree free of the distances she has to travel