That is RPC. It screams RPC. There is so much coupling on display that it should be given an X rating

Worse yet, Word appears to no longer support Thai language — meaning it’s not fit-for-purpose for my wife either. Unfortunately, we left the Office 2003 disk in storage, back in NZ, so we can’t rollback to the version of Office that did support Thai language.

Exactly why is Office such a cash cow for Microsoft? Because of muppets like me, obviously.

Transpose Red Elephant’s menu and chefs to the Thai Friends location and you’d have the perfect restaurant. As it is, I’d rather put up with the crappy view of Khyber Pass and the motorway, and enjoy the steamed snapper and flaming chicken.

Interestingly, I have yet to find a Thai restaurant in London which comes even close to Red Elephant. The closest would be (coincidentally) Blue Elephant in Fulham — but that has variety in its favour rather than quality.

First talk, good. Last talk, good. Stuff in between… meh.

Highlights of the evening: catching up with Ben. And, after 7 years, finally meeting Alan (the last talk!) in person…

…even if it was only for a few minutes.

On one hand:

In particular, households are being squeezed by higher fuel prices since the budget, he said. Gasoline prices have surged 14 percent the past three months

and then on the other:

…workers needed to be aware of the outlook for the economy when they made wage claims… …Wage expectations in the public sector haven’t caught up with the changing economic environment. Some have lost a bit of contact with reality.

The word that jumps to mind starts with T and ends with WIT.

Cool geek-out moment!

I contacted Nintendo UK to find out for sure, and they confirmed, yes it was region locked… but then went on to describe the region locking as though it was tied to the TV colour encoding system. They continued, “For example, the UK uses PAL-a, and New Zealand uses PAL-b which should be compatible”.

I’m guessing the question was completely misunderstood.

Anyway, rather then destroying any chance of becoming carbon-neutral this century, I thought it was worth buying a local game and trying it out. Zack & Wiki duly arrived from Amazon, and was inserted, with some trepidation, into the console… and worked perfectly.

Conclusion: if the Wii region encoding is controllable by the publisher, as some have reported (see the comments of that page), then Capcom, at least, have not exercised that control. Well done Capcom, and… awesome game, by the way.

Two wrongs making a right? Only time will tell.

I never click on spam links. To mix a few metaphors, one has to be rather too many brain cells short of a four-cylinder engine to click on anything in a spam message.

I do have an excuse for my actions, although rather a feeble one: I was skimming rather quickly through my new mail and went from one email, from my father, to another. The second email was about replica watches.

Why is he sending me emails about replica watches?

The email was in a similar format to some of his others (a paragraph of text followed by a link), but the words “replica watches” and that link somehow caught my attention. An ominous orchestral theme should have started up as I moved my mouse, in slow motion of course, towards that little blue underlined set of characters…

I realised yesterday, after receiving another message about replica watches that I’d been duped. By the bizarre combination of a spam message formatted exactly the same as another, and the fact that Thunderbird occasionally doesn’t update the header info (from address, subject, etc) at the top of the message when I flick through too fast.

And somewhere there’s a twit with Dr Evil ambitions who’s currently rubbing his hands together with glee, because the “sucker” light has just flicked on next to my email address. I can look forward to an inundation of messages about cheap gucci bags, replica watches, “enlargement” remedies, and so on.

Needless to say, I won’t be buying that Breitling at the fraction of the price of the original.

…

Meh

…

“Papa, what’s yod?”

“What’s WHAT??”

“Yod!”

“I don’t know.”

Kid wanders off, and comes back 2 minutes later.

“What’s yod?”

“I don’t know. What do you mean by yod? I don’t know any such word.”

Kid sighs in exasperation (conveying depths of feeling only possible in the average 5 year old), and stalks off down the hallway…. singing the NZ National Anthem to herself:

“Yod of Nations, at thy feet, in the bonds of yove we meet”.

Ah… that Yod…

Again.

My carbon footprint must be of obscene proportions, given this is now the 5th time I’ve made a move from NZ to the UK.

A couple of immediate impressions after arriving back in the Mother Country:

1. I’d forgotten how dang cold this part of the northern hemisphere is. Even after leaving a rather average start of summer (well it was pretty average in Dec).

2. Getting longer-term accommodation is a nightmare — particularly the referencing process. We’re (hopefully) moving out to Rickmansworth next week (that’s Hertfordshire for the uninitiated), but it hasn’t been straightforward. Touch wood, cross fingers, etc, etc, etc.

3. Mobile phones are so much cheaper than back home. Even prepay. 15p for the first minute and 5p after. That’s about $NZ0.41c per minute followed by 0.14c per min. Plus free mobile phones with an 18 months plan, and in some cases free gifts like Sony PS3s, Nintendo Wiis, iPods, etc. Of course, those are for the crappier models.

4. Dang it’s cold here.

Even down to the spiky tail.

Interesting…

To put it in perspective, my lowly WordPress plugin has yet to hit that number in a year or two.

Well… …I’ve hardly been slashdotted, or dugg, but I’m impressed.

The URL can be found here. I’ll keep comments open on both pages, until any kinks have been ironed out. Here’s hoping it’s useful…

In Rainbows.

Register.

Decide what I want to pay.

Pay.

Download.

Instant gratification in less than 4 mins. First track sounds good as well.

I couldn’t agree more. I have no idea about any of the candidates for the Auckland mayoralty, other than the current encumbent and the previous. Neither of whom I have any interest in voting for. Oh yeah, and the guy who started that horrible excuse for gratuitous nudity on Auckland’s Queen street. Skanks-on-bikes, or whatever it’s called.

The other half dozen or more candidates are unknowns. The paragraph on each person in the voting documents, is hardly enough to make a decision on who should be running the city for the next few years.

It seems to me, there’s an easy, web-based answer to fix a lack of interest in local-body elections. How about a simple form which asks a bunch of questions about relevant topics and, based on the answers given, presents the list of candidates who match the recipient’s answers. Questions like:

Would you increase rates to build more parks: Yes/No/Undecided
Do you believe rates are being used properly in [some area]: Yes/No
Which are do you think the council should focus on for the next term: [topic 1], [topic 2], [topic 3], [topic 4]…
Rank these issues in order of importance: [topic 1], [topic 2], [topic 3], [topic 4], [topic 5]…

etc

There could be a 2 minute form (short list of questions), 5 minute and 10 minute form (long list of questions), depending upon how much effort you wanted to put into your selection. The list of candidates at the end would be sorted by the percentage match to the recipient’s answers, and contain links to more information about their candidacy. It’s just a quick jump from there to adding online voting. Tick boxes next to the candidates in your list who you want to vote for.

Doesn’t seem like rocket science, and wouldn’t necessarily have to cost as much money as the Government throws into other projects. And at least there’d be more chance I’ll be choosing the right set of candidates, based on what I think is important. At the moment, I’ve got no idea.

When my daughter was about 2 and a half years old, we got a long piece of string, poked it through holes in a pair of yogurt containers, pulled the string tight and used it as a telephone. It was difficult to get the concept across to a 2 year old; of talking into the container, then listening for the response. It was also difficult keep the string taut enough, so that sound waves were transmitted properly.

Somehow, Orcon have managed not only to keep a piece of string tight over thousands of kilometres, they have also managed to connect the yogurt container to the local internet loop. An extremely impressive piece of engineering. Even if it does mean my international traffic is slower than a 28K modem. Just think of the science!

So it’s now almost a month since I first noticed the problem, and over 3 weeks since I reported it — and there is still no resolution in sight. At least a couple of emails have gone unanswered in the last few weeks, although the initial response from their support department (instructions on how to provide all the data their technicians would need) was positive. Last night I finally gave up waiting and decided to sit on hold for 10 minutes or so. Their helpdesk, while nice enough (and local), were unable to shed any light and would need to pass on the details to technicians. But…

“…we have had reports from other customers of similar problems… it may have something to do with the traffic shaping…”

Yes. I’m blimmin’ well aware that it’s traffic shaping. I could’ve told you that a month ago.

“…a quick fix might be to upgrade your plan…”

Where’s the sound of screeching tyres when you want it?

Upgrade my plan?

I must remember that if I ever get a complaint about software I’ve developed…

“I’m sorry you’re having problems sir. Other people have also experienced problems with that version of our software. I invite you to upgrade to a more expensive version, in which we have fixed that issue.”

PS. Unsurprisingly, still no response from technical support.

Steve Yegge’s Tech News — humour you’ll only ‘get’ if you’re a techie, and Neil Gaiman’s “at-a-glance guide“. Which I still keep laughing at (the last 2 photos) every time I go back to look at them.