Well, that movie goes in the "Feel your IQ dropping" list.

Looking back over the past few weeks I think Sci Fi Soc possibly needs to delegate someone else to pick movies for a while.

(aka House-cooling at The Sanctuary)
Carnival Party

Telethon song re-recorded for Big Night In

I'm of the opinion they should have done something new.

Followed a link from an RSS feed to a random blog.

What do you think my dream is? Do I even have one? (Pls answer before reading other comments, but I'm not screening. The FB post duplication limits the usefulness of that feature)

My parents came in today with firewood and food, and while my mother & sister went to the mall my father & I went over some of the 8mm movies. In places it seems a lot of material has just basically evaporated from the reels leaving white empty film with the occasional few frames showing up, which is a shame.

There's actually quite a bit of interesting material. Some of the country around Cromwell, now flooded by the Clyde dam for example. Ilam Road, near Memorial Ave, circa '60's - I was like, seriously? wtf? Very tempted to youtube those few seconds.

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Went to Transformers II last night - the movie is best seen as a ride, and from that perspective it's done quite well. Don't go for the (lack of) plot, go for the big robots and explosions.
I would really like to have seen the Autobots from the first movie other than Optimus and Bumblebee given more character time. Was again disappointed by the preponderance of bodily-function humour, but at least there wasn't as much teen-comedy-shmultz to get in the way of the action this time.

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Soldier of the line how does it feel
you´re far away from home polishing steel
The sun moves in between the mountain and sky
As dawn puts out it´s fingers splitting them wide
Soldier of the line what do you know
About the other side, they never show
They must be well disguised biding their time
Their armour well prepared so nothing will shine

Hereditary Sword (aka Bloodline Sword)
These weapons are crafted so as to be attuned to the descendants of a certain individual or family, and to all others serve as no more than a masterwork sword. Exact abilities vary as with any other magical weapon (and not all Hereditary weapons are swords).

Some families are larger than others (and Hereditary weapons don't usually distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate family members), so some older Hereditary swords turn up in the history books more often than others. Some do have greater restrictions on their wielder - the oldest female child, or the heir designate for example.

Each Hereditary sword is a unique item, but because of their use in identifying members of a bloodline some forgeries attuned to other individuals or requiring an activation of some form have been forged over the years. These rarely have more than the minimum abilities required to propagate the disguise.

Via The Chief Happiness Officer, Thoughts from the C train has an anecdote about dealing with one of those customers

I got called that one time. Swear. Say it: Phenomenal Cesspool of Incompetence. It's brilliant! I mean seriously, who can come up with that shit? Well I'll tell you who . . . kind of.

Imagine looking across the Canterbury Plains to the brilliantly clear Southern Alps and seeing the mushroom clouds rising beyond them; impossibly high into the atmosphere, impossibly far away, one after another until the sun is blacked out.

Poll #1421653 Nuclear future
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Where would your loyalty lie?

I'm not so much interested in the article, but in the fact that it's made mention in the mainstream media. Slow news day, gamer at the Herald or RPGs no longer niche?

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10579328

SEATTLE - Eight people face accusations they illegally posted the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons' newest handbook for download on the internet.

John Roughan in the Herald, after getting some insulation put in.

Two days after the Budget the installer returned to put in some final brackets and I said I guessed his business must be booming on the subsidy just announced.

Like hell, he replied. It had completely ruined his cash flow. Of the 28 orders on his books before that Thursday, all but two had cancelled.

The rest were going to wait for the Government's grant next month and most of them, he reckoned, were waiting in vain; the job they wanted would not be nearly enough to qualify.
...
"Eeca", as the authority is already known to my insulation man, prefers firms large enough to meet its Maori employment quota among other criteria he mentioned.

He described an industry thrown into disarray and said he would find someone to say so publicly, but hasn't. Half a dozen insulation firms contacted by the Weekend Herald last week all said they were busy. Two were planning to take on staff.

They were among the 33 approved providers of the government scheme. The authority is taking applications from others but a spokeswoman said it would be September before more may be approved.

Forget about who introduced the scheme, what we're talking about could be the law of unforseen consequences but in all likelihood is the result of someone not thinking or just not caring about all the likely consequences of introducing a new scheme. Like the person who decided a mixer had to be added to the out-pipe of hot water-cylinders to reduce the temperature without considering what this could do to the pressure at the tap/showerhead, this policy was obviously implemented without thinking about what people who were about to get insulation put in would do when they might suddenly get it a $grand cheaper by cancelling their order and waiting a month.

The scheme is a good idea, the implementation is a bit fail. Sure I wouldn't have thought of it but it's not my job to catch these things. I do kind of expect better from the experts who supposedly staff government departments.

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Also from the Herald, the possibilities inherent in adding technology to the national trucking fleet.

If there's a government fee regime that's ripe for an electronic makeover, it's the collection of road user charges from the national diesel truck fleet, totalling about $800 million a year.

The article mentions that persuading the industry establishment to implement the new technology is a major stumbling block. On that note ReadWriteWeb recently had an article about why the 'smart-grid', which could lead to an internet-like burst of innovation around electrical and other utility services, isn't going to be with us any time soon. The earth2tech article which inspired that post also has a bit of a follow up here.

She draws a comparison with real time GIS location data, which telecom companies initially objected was too expensive to deliver and not really needed by consumers. When the killer app of turn-by-turn driving directions was invented, that debate was put to rest and the real time geolocation data infrastructure was born.
...
What's the killer app for smart utility grids? Fehrenbacher says she doesn't know and that's the point - we can't even imagine what kinds of cool and useful applications will be developed on that platform once it's available. The lack of a killer app leads to less support for the building of the platform, though, a catch-22 we can relate to from discussions of our calls to open up aggregate activity data from social networks for analysis.

Fibre to or from the farm - there's another possible example from my special interests :D
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Finally, great little newspaper motto via Busytown - "If you don't want it printed, don't let it happen."

Neverwinter last night was mostly 'hang on to the locomotive while the GM narrates', but we've missed two sessions and I decided to do away with the trap-laden dungeon crawl. The Word of Protection (now in the PCs possession, where it more or less wants to be) has both more direct and more subtle methods anyway.

The PCs received their rewards for this arc, and the players will be happy shopping over the coming week. I've decided to let them have a significant power boost so they can start facing off with some big opponents over the last few months of the campaign.

~~~
This afternoon was the SAGA board games afternoon, which was well attended. I played one game of Ticket to Ride, one of Hunters & Gatherers and two of Pandemic (1 overrun by the black plague, 1 win). I was so engrossed in the games I forgot to take any photos despite deliberately taking my camera along.

This has left me a little peopled out.

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Finally located a photo of myself from the SteamPunk party in March, yay Jen.

( snip )

01. Anyone who wants to can post this meme and their current wallpaper at their LiveJournal.
02. Explain in five sentences why you're using that wallpaper!
03. Don't change your wallpaper before doing this! The point is to see what you had on!

Rather than taking a screenshot I've uploaded a small version of the image I'm using.


This is a recent aerial photo looking over the hills where I grew up. You can't see the homestead for trees but the woolshed is fairly visible. My father and grandfather farmed this land and back upriver, my great or great-great grandfather was farm manager on the other side of the river so it's thoroughly in my blood even if I didn't quite get the farming gene.

From up here it almost looks like nothing has changed - the trees are a bit taller is all - but I've been back once some years ago and it's true what they say about not being able to go home.

It's only a dark smudge in this image but in the middle of the top left quadrant is the hill where they built Edoras for the LOTR movies.

On Sunday Bernard Hickey posted Ten tips to tax NZ out of dire straits in his blog at the NZ Herald. I hope his tongue was firmly in his cheek with this one, because I don't normally I don't find his views too extreme.

Much on the list can be torn apart, although I'm aware that they all represent desperately loved and defended ideologies of the far right. I'm going to take issue with one here.

5. Impose a flat tax on land, as is the case in Hong Kong. This would incentivise investment in capital and business ideas rather than land speculation. It's also much cleaner and cheaper to administer than a capital gains tax on property investment. Farmers and property owners would scream blue murder, but they have made out like bandits for decades.

Firstly, we have one of these already, although it's not strictly speaking flat. It's called 'Rates' and is paid to local government. And frankly farmers already pay much more (by virtue of the areas of their properties) for fewer services than those of us in the city.

I think I get a pretty good deal in town for my $1500/year just between roads, rubbish collection, water, sewerage disposal, without even getting into parks, libraries, public events.... My rural parents pay a lot more for .... of the above; roads I think, maybe water. And sure there's more road per head out there but there's also not much in the way of the other things.

Secondly, and following on from that, some farmers may have 'made out like bandits' (if you believe the main stream media), but I'm positive it's not the majority needed to make a blanket statement like that stick. Especially if you haven't been in dairy over the past few years it has not been all strawberries and cream. (Tangent: from the high of 70 million sheep in 1984 the NZ flock now numbers only 34 million).

And if they are, so what? Someone has to have the money to spend to drive the economy and who better, those who put in the hard hours and the sweat of their brow or the fat cats who take and sell the hard made commodities and skim off the profits?

Thirdly, he's just plain wrong about the flat tax in Hong Kong. Someone was kind enough to point it out in the Herald comments but the Hong Kong property tax is on rental income.

Ultimately though the problem with this is that it strikes deep at the concept of property ownership, which happens to be one of my personal bugbears. A man's home is his castle, except when it's actually owned by his feudal lord to whom he pays a tithe ... see the similarity to Mr Hickey's suggestion?

There is in New Zealand at least the illusion that anyone can aspire to actually own property rather than leasing it from the powers that be. It's a pretty tenuous illusion at times, with all the permissions you have to get to actually build or grow anything on the land you theoretically own. To some extent it's a price you pay for living in a modern society - but that's a different rant. This suggestion would pretty much destroy that illusion - if you want to 'own' the government's land (because it's all the government's land) you pay them for the privilege.

Now if it was actually clear what services you were paying for (as it is, relatively) with rates, it could make more sense. Like road taxes should be spent on roads first and then excess into the general fund (or out, in the case of a shortfall). Like tobacco taxes should go directly to health (actually I believe tobacco should be de-legalised, but again that's a different rant).

Income tax can go wherever it's needed, before some smart-ass asks.

Naturally I've set up a profile for Gameathon, and seeded the kitty. You to can now make a donation by credit-card here.

One thing I noticed almost immediately after setting up the profile is that there is no direct link back to the event you're sponsoring. It appears in the sidebar, but linked to the official site. So if you don't want your donation associated with Gameathon, you can make it here. Or there are paypal links on the support us page of the Big Night In website.

It would be nice if they had a widget to display the counter on the main site. Perhaps I can build one.

Did anyone else get an email from 'feedmil.com' asking for more information on their LJ RSS/Atom feed?

End of Term party


I had a good party - being awake probably helped :D , Danced quite a bit, made my good deeds quota and got home about 2:30am.

I have just emerged from a 3 hour nap digesting a very late lunch / early dinner at 181 Restaurant (Northlands Mall).

That's the restaurant that was purchased over Trademe for $181 a while ago, then sold king-size CookieTimes on Trademe to raise the funds to actually open. I went in at a quiet time and was the only one eating there, so I had the chance to chat with the manager and later Theresa herself about how things were going.

From an eat-in perspective they do an all day breakfast, regular meals and a selection of gourmet burgers.
- Upon enquiry they can do most of the regular meals gluten free on request but not the burgers.
- They have a vegetarian burger and some of the breakfast options don't include meat but veggie options are otherwise limited. I expect the salad could be made -without- bacon strips.

I likes my burgers, so I ordered one of those. I expected something of size for the price (mid-teens), but was still impressed by the small mountain (plus salad and chips) which was delivered to me. I recall there was a price option for 1/2 burgers noted on the menu which is good, because it was the size of meal I can only manage when very hungry. Luckily a late light brunch had left me in a suitable condition to address it properly.

My lifetime membership (which came with the cookie) makes all meals 25% off - which turned an already good value meal into a stupidly good value meal.

I will have to return at one of their busier times and see how they handle that. But I enjoyed practically having a restaurant to myself :D

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Side note - menumania.co.nz wins over dineout.co.nz for reviews because menumania doesn't require you to sign up for an account before you can leave a review!

There is something to be said for playing Civ II into the small hours, going to bed exhausted and not getting up until nearly mid-day with nothing particular to do. With a bit of luck it will shock my system back into a reasonable schedule - sleeping has been poor and getting up in the morning hard recently.

So I think I'm going to spend this afternoon filing the receipts which came back from the accountant last week, and then since I managed to invoice more than expected on Friday I'll let myself afford a meal out and activate my membership at 181.

It's a shame the nice weather seems to be going away :(