Posts by Julian Melville
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AND, more importantly 'blackouts'.
Penalize people who happen to be in a nearby postcode and can't make it to the game? They do that in Australia and it's a crap idea, you can't talk about the game with anybody in another part of the country and plenty of people have legitimate reasons for not going along on the day. It ends up punishing spectators instead of encouraging them.
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In about 1989 I was doing a communications software course at Waikato University in which we used a Unix box. I remember being told not to message or annoy one particular user if we saw him on there because he was connecting from (Cornell? Princeton? somewhere like that) to use the machine. It was one of those weird moments where you just think "huh!" and don't quite process the significance of it.
The community aspect of the net was what sucked me in. By about 1993 I was reading newsgroups on the Waikato VAX cluster and came across alt.tv.mst3k (about Mystery Science Theater 3000), when I asked what on earth this was all about somebody sent me tapes from the US. Unfortunately they were NTSC and used a super long recording format so I didn't actually get to watch them until some years later!
Somewhere along the line I got some of the old valve audio gear from Hamilton's Carlton Cinema when it closed down. The equipment was from 1953 and I knew nothing about it. A couple of questions on rec.audio.high-end and not only did I discover that McIntosh made very good gear, somebody ended up contacting the New York-based company on my behalf and mailing me brochures and circuit diagrams.
Once in all innocence I asked the good folk of alt.postmodern what postmodernism was all about. Talk about lighting the blue touchpaper and standing back! Won't be doing that again in a hurry...
I remember the few years when the internet had huge penetration in the academic community and almost none outside. In 1993 the hard rock guitarist George Lynch was reported to have died and the local rock station organised a big tribute show. I rang them and told them that it wasn't true and that I'd read about it on the internet. A deafening silence and then they hung up. Just not ready for it I guess.
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This reminds me of the trike-a-thon I took part in in 1979, aged 4. I got about halfway around the Hillcrest cycle track on my trike
Wow, my thoughts exactly... same cycle track, it may have even been the same year. I don't think I cut back across the middle though. The Hillcrest cycle track is clearly much more brutal than it looks from the road.
and:
Is not the person who crosses the line first on a lap the person who is winning?
I think the point is that once you've achieved your extra lap, you get the credit for that and then your position becomes once again just one of the pack. NZ got the 5 points at one stage because they were attempting to steal a lap and so were about half a lap ahead of the main field.
I really enjoyed both the points race and the Madison, and I'll be watching out for both of them next time round.
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I spent years not seeing the point of getting married, and then one day all of a sudden I did. I'm not really sure what changed, or why, but it turned out that my wife-to-be felt the same way.
So we got married in a garden with about 80 friends, a live band and cocktails all round. It wasn't all that traditional, or all that non-traditional, but it was a bloody good day out.
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That myPVR box looks cute, thanks for that Mark...
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A technical question then, that I haven't been able to figure out. If you want to have Sky channels, and Freeview as well, and be able to schedule recordings of any of them, what's the solution? Do you need to have a media PC or is there another way?
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Brilliant. "tastes like normal beer, but with sugar in it" is where I actually laughed out loud though :)
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I was wondering, given that honking your horn was taken as a sign of support, just exactly how you were supposed to show your displeasure of the truckie protest and how anyone else would know. Projectile weapons?
But, given the breathless coverage from most of the media "I'm sitting in the cab of this big rig as we cruise at 2 km/h through Mt Wellington", I reckon that Cycle Action needs to think much bigger than just clogging up the Harbour Bridge. Gridlock the whole city and then everyone will love ya!
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Kiwi Marina Erakovic has made it round 2 (first NZer to do so at a grand Slam for >10 years), and it’s on at 9p.m. NZT. Lets see whether they show it…
I guess that's "yep". Watching it right now.
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Personally, given my motorsport bias, I think Sky have an entirely healthy lock on TV sport. They do a decent job of covering nearly all the major series and they often screen repeats and highlights packages of top events. Recently we've even started getting good coverage of things like GP2 that are less well-known but great to watch.
Free to air TV generally shows an event once, often very late at night. Sometimes it's weeks late (e.g. TV One usually shows MotoGP races on the weekend of the subsequent event).
The motorsport magazine shows on 1 and 3 are several hours long once a week and have no indication externally (website, whatever) what events will be covered so you can't record one race, and you can't program a PVR or the Sky box to switch over just for that.
Frankly, fuck that. Sky can have my $70 a month and I consider it well spent.