Dear Apple Computer,
congratulations on the hard work you have put in to producing your greenest mac ever, I bet it was really hard work.

However, I must let you know about a few oversights on your part.
1) Outside of North America, in the rest of the civilised world, people who say “aloominum” are douchebags, regardless of officialities. Don’t be a douchebag. It’s spelled aluminium, you can pronounce it “al-oo-min-ee-um”. Want to impress those of us who loathe Windows constantly defaulting to EN-US as the language? Don’t discard the obvious syllable. Or at the very least, get a localised dubover.

It’s bad enough that we have kids these days calling Jam “jelly”, and Biscuits “cookies”, and the letter Zed “zee”. Insulting us (especially commonwealtheans) further does not make you sales.

2) Make the ability to give such feedback directly possible on your website, plzkthx.

3) I look forward to buying a mac tablet. Hurry up with that, and make sure it’s made of aluminium, not aluminum.

Hugs and kisses.

Me.

When I’m walking down the street and there’s someone nearby – maybe a few paces behind me – with heels on, going cloppity cloppity, this runs through my head:

Is it quite necessary to sound like a horse when walking down the street? You can get good looking non-cloppity shoes these days folks, we have the technology!

Willy DeVille – It’s Too Late She’s Gone

I was at a bar with a couple of friends earlier, and myself and one friend were recalling some jesus jokes from an improv comedy we saw last week. A very odd gentleman had strutted into the bar and was not far away from us waiting for his tipple. He demanded quite loudly that we not take the lord’s name in vain.

Now, I am Catholic by birth and christening/baptism, I’m dirty filthy Presby by indoctrination (Damn you Religious Instruction class at school! Get ‘em young!) I am agnostic (though more atheist leaning) by choice and Buddhist by practice – believe it or not. I do think that if I swung back to Christianity, that it would be more on the terms of the Gospel of Thomas – the kingdom of heaven within etc I’d have my own dialogue with God, no need for the sheep in a flock superstitious nonsense of churches.

My argument is this:
The Old Testament (that is, the book of the Jewish) has a lot of smite, burning bushes and vengefulness. As I recall it has some 80 or so rules above and beyond (and usually mixed with, depending on your denomination) the Ten Commandments. I personally recognise the George Carlin “three commandments” derivative of the Roman Catholic commandments, any other commandment sets are tainted by any of the other Yahweh rules. One of these rules is about not imbibing alcomohol.

Here is a guy preaching to us about not taking the lord’s name in vain, yet he’s sinning, by Jewish standards and at least one Christian denomination’s standards. Twice the ticket to hell, buddy.

Then there’s Jesus. Ok, so we have the holy trinity: The Father, The Son, The Holy Ghost, right? Well, “The Father” implies that he is authoritive over The Son and The Holy Ghost. Jesus, the son, was sent to die for our sins as a physical manifestation serving his father’s divine will, so he’s really a messianistic dead end. And the ghost? Look, he was off getting stoned and would appear centuries later as Slimer in the Ghostbusters franchise.

So our lord is not Jesus, it is Yahweh to the Jewish, Jehovah to the Christians, and Allah to the Muslims. All Abrahamic religions recognise the same god, they merely differ on the messenger (A big shout out to John the Messenger!) Jesus is not the lord for the Jews or the Muslims, the one true lord for all Abrahamic religions is GOD. Joking about Jesus, or flusteringly saying “Jesus Christ!” is not taking the lord’s name in vain, not in the big scheme of things.

Then there’s the whole New Testament conflict with the Old Testament, or at least this one singular conflict: The original book has that rule about not imbibing, the reimagined edition has a superhero who routinely turns water into wine for his crew. He came to save us from our sins by throwing a sinful party?

I was about to go all Kevin Smith level diatribe on this guy, but the Buddhism took over and I STFU and went back to my CC and Dry.

Eric Clapton – It’s In The Way That You Use It

I was going to link to some videos that I’ve been watching at work, and guffawing loudly at much to my bosses chagrin, but it seems that Youtube has cut them down and suspended the author’s account.

These videos were the so called “Alternate Reality Dragon Ball Z” series. And they were fucking brilliant. There’s simply no polite-dinner-conversation way to put it, they were amazing, and an absolute riot for anyone who has half-arsedly watched more than three dragon ball (z/gt) episodes while hungover.

They were text-book parody, so they fall under the fair-use/fair-dealing clause of the Berne Copyright Convention and ANY subsequent international copyright law. Given that the original Dragon Ball author, Akira Toriyama, was into self-parody, I would bet that he – as the original copyright owner – would find the ARDBZ series to be an absolute laugh, and I will bet anyone 5 yen that he would have approved.

Not to mention that the ARDBZ creator actively told his audience to PURCHASE the DVD’s and CD’s, he was not only within the confines of international copyright law, he was also doing the copyright holders a free service – advertising.

But alas, some disinterested moron lawyer from some idiotic money grabbing corporate nazi company whinged over his latte to his fellow disinterested idiot lawyer from some moronic money grabbing corporate nazi company, and the terms of free speech and legitimate parody clauses in INTERNATIONAL copyright law were all shat on.

And to think, I was going to blog about an idiot MP blithering on about banning GTA-IV without ever playing it (don’t knock it till you’ve tried it, MORON), or my generous gift today of thousands of dollars of ex-company equipment to a local polytech (community college for the American readers), or maybe the 50km bike ride I had planned for this weekend.

I’d go super saiyan over this, but I might get a cease and desist

Concord Dawn – Never Give Up on Love (Featuring Tiki)

Hutt News, Page 10. Cheers for the heads up Crusty-C.

(Click for a 1.1M version)

Pendulum – Out Here

So a guy took a swing at me in a fish and chip shop. He got a jabbed larynx and the killer right cross for his troubles.

Isn’t alcohol fun?

Pendulum – Out Here

The latest Hutt News pissed me off. Too many people making uninformed opinions, bleating on with generic rhetoric. It pushed me to the point of writing my second ever letter to the editor. Let’s see if it gets published, stay tuned!

Dear Editor,
Regarding Nuclear Energy: No.  To the people who are jumping on the nuclear equals green bandwagon, while it is indeed less pollutive than say, Huntly, it’s a simple matter of economics, future technologies and alternative mentalities.

New Zealand has 4.26 million people in an area of approx 268,680 km sq.  It is an isolated island nation, astride the Pacific “ring of fire.”  The closest comparative country, also on the ring of fire, is Japan.  Japan has a population of over 127 million in an area of approx 377,873 km sq.  The other island nation to compare to, the United Kingdom, has nearly 61 million people within approx 244,820 km sq.

Japan and the UK can justify nuclear energy via supply and demand:  In terms of density, Japan has 339 people per sq km, the UK has 246.  We have around 15 per sq km.  Nuclear energy, while great on paper, is simply uneconomical for NZ at this point in time.  There is basically no realistic return on investment, and should a plant proposal get through the red tape of resource consents etc, no-one in their right mind would fund such a venture.

And as for those blithering on about “what about another Chernobyl?!”, look, Chernobyl was a rushed plant based on a flawed design over 20 years ago.  It was Soviet corner-cutting at its worst, and even though it was built in the Generation II era, it was by design no better than a Generation I reactor. We’re up to Generation IV designs now, including designs that will do nothing at all when void of coolant.  You’re simply more likely to be hit by bird droppings while in the middle of an air traffic accident during a solar eclipse than you are to experience another Chernobyl in your lifetime.

The main concern with Nuclear is the insistence that it has to be Uranium based.  Uranium has limited reserves, of which only 0.7% of (natural) reserves can be used.  However it remains popular because of the existing technologies/infrastructure and that it generates the most weapons grade material.  Basically, any investment in Uranium based technology is a wasted investment, because like oil it is a dead-end resource.

Thorium, on the other hand, is much safer and has reserves to last us several hundreds, if not thousands of years.  It is more efficient, can burn conventional nuclear waste, generates less waste, the waste it does generate has a half-life measured in dozens of years instead of hundreds/thousands, and it produces considerably less weapons grade material.  Thorium is the answer to that (George Dubya voice) “Iran + Nukular = Terrism” non-issue that we in the West are being ignorantly force-fed.  And to top it off Australia has the largest Thorium reserves in the world, followed by India, making it the most suitable Nuclear technology for NZ should it ever become economically and politically desirable for us.

But it’s all for nothing, really.  The latest estimates from MIT is that if current funding continues, we’ll have commercial-grade fusion reactors within 30 years.  Fusion is infinately safer and less wasteful, and any radioactive leftover from the process has a significantly lower half-life than present fission technologies.

The only real way forward in the meantime, though, is to do away with the silly notion that all electricity absolutely must be generated centrally.  If we all had some combination of insulated homes, energy-efficient appliances, hybrid solar lighting, solar hot water panels, and small 1-2kWh cowl-style wind turbines, our dependance on our aging and inefficient national grid would collectively decrease.  

Imagine; no more moaning in the middle of winter about lake levels, if only we’d all do our part, starting with the government retrofitting all state buildings and offering subsidies to people on their “Welcome Home” first home loan package.

The business model of the electricty industry would change – you’d basically augment your at-home-generated energy with units from a conventional provider.  It would be possible under the right conditions for even a city council to generate and supply electricity, maybe finally giving us the competition that we were promised all those years ago when the industry was shaken up.  Decentralisation is the key.

We have the technology now, we just lack the mentality and political motivation.  And without either we’re not going to innovate, we’re not going to apply our #8 Wire ingenuity, we’re not going to go anywhere.  We’ll stay stuck here in our anti-progressive public bickering session.

The fact remains though: For every wind turbine you protest, a little Huntly keeps polluting.

Rawiri Blundell
Petone

Anoushka Shankar & Karsh Kale – Easy (Feat. Norah Jones)

I’m not happy again. This time because the government in its wisdom has banned outright BZP.  So you have two weeks to stock up, and a six month amnesty period to use it. Now, I’m not keen on party pills, which is what this legislation is all about, however I am keen on the BZP-based metabolism enhancers that I have been on for the last few months.

Wait, what?

Allow me to explain. I worked shift work for three years, which absolutely destroyed my body chemical balance – specifically my testosterone and seratonin levels dropped to dangerous lows. The screwed circadian rhythm also resulted in a pretty badly affected metabolism – basically meaning that while I was sitting there at my desk in a zombie like state, miserable and depressed, alone in the office babysitting a couple of datacentres, my slow metabolism was simply not touching the copious energy-dense foods and drinks I was consuming in an attempt to stay awake; essentially the six red bulls and three coffees I was having every night was immediately stored.

Couple that with my maternal family’s history of thyroid gland problems (the thyroid gland helps to regulate metabolism), and you can see that I’ve been up against the odds for the last year while I’ve been trying to straighten things out.

The alarm bells went off for me when I got back from France, and the so called “Heathrow injection” effect was beginning to show – in three weeks I had piled on the kilos, and for the first time in my life I was well over the ton (for those not familiar with the term, that’s 100kg/220lbs). I have since lost 15kg through playing Touch and embracing a focus on boosting my metabolism. Why the focus on metabolism? Because regulating your metabolism will adjust the rate that your body burns energy while you’re at rest, and as I work mostly at a desk it’s the most useful thing one can do for a primarily sedentary role like mine. Because exercising at your desk in an open plan office is going to make you look like an idiot. I also get the occassional workplace exercise by moving servers about and contorting myself around racks and such, which is my equivilent to Fartlek (speed/interval training) which also increases metabolism.

What else have I been doing? I’ve been taking BZP based metabolism enhancers, along with breakfast every day. Regular breakfast also increases your metabolism, and it doesn’t really matter so much what you have for breakfast – just that you have something, as the whole point of breakfast is to kickstart your blood pressure, blood sugars etc. These pills might have a slight high the first time you take them, but the second day you take them and onwards they have NO high and NO come down. And any high you do get on them is barely equivilent to a couple of short blacks back to back. I got more of a buzz out of the thimble size espressos you get in France.

They are not party pills, they are dietary suppliments, and abusing them in an attempt to get a lame high will only result in, I’m told, a splitting migraine and the runs, which is just a massive incentive isn’t it? If I don’t focus on correcting my screwed metabolism, I will over-time bloat to blimp size proportions and then the taxpayer will have to pay to get my stomach stapled. Great going there, Hon. Jim Anderton. This is a prime case of “everything in moderation” being able to be applied sensibly that was flat out ignored by a stupid piece of rushed, ignorantly and poorly thought out legislation.

So I’ve just had to dish out a wad of cash for three month’s supply. After that I guess I’ll just have to chug flaxseed oil and switch to thermogenics, which are more expensive and not as effective, oh yay.

Stabbing Westward – The Thing I Hate

Last night we went out to play touch, unfortunately our team was down by several people and where we need 7 people to play, only 4 showed up. One of them was Rob, who then parked his car across the street from my place to be picked up in the morning – allowing him to enjoy some after game drinks.

So we had after game drinks and proceeded down to the pub, Rob was picked up by his partner Sarah and everything was looking good. I made my way home and upon arriving I saw that something didn’t look right with Rob’s car. In fact, something was wrong, very wrong.

Some assclown had biffed a rock through the passenger door window. I checked Rob’s car for his effects, txt’d him to let him know and then sent him a picture. Rob had a stack of CD’s worth more than the car, and a bunch of cricket gear worth considerably more than the car, yet they remained untouched. The fact that the window was smashed for a cowardly laugh instead of for a purpose is what really grinds my gears the most about this.

I was spitting tacks. To the point where while I was ankle deep in glass shards trying to secure Rob’s stuff, and some g-unit homeboy swaggered up and asked me for some cigarettes, I was right on the verge of beating the crap out of him. I haven’t been that furious in some time.