mogest

Evian says on their water bottles:

It is no wonder therefore, Evian is The Official Bottled Water of The Championships, Wimbledon. Its purity makes it the choice of champions.

Even ignoring the gross misuse of the English language, what a load of crap. It’s the “choice of champions” (and losers) because you spent a buttload of money to sponsor the tennis. They’re not allowed any other water bottle on the court. That doesn’t make it a choice.

Also, your water isn’t more pure because it’s “been filtered for 15 years through the pristine heights of the French Alps” (the pristine heights? What does that even mean?) It’s got a lot of minerals in there specifically because of that fact, making it less pure.

Let’s finish off with their strapline, “Live Young”, which means absolutely nothing at all. Presumably they mean “live youthfully”, which has shit all to do with drinking bottled water.

(You do have a good bottle design, though.)

When I was a kid, I used to pretend that my piano keyboard was some kind of super controller.  One button would turn the lights on and off.  Another would open the curtains.  There is no lower age limit to geekdom, it turns out.

But now I don’t have to pretend any more, since a couple of these and this turned up yesterday. This is the future, people. Not quite a hover car, but close enough.

Absolutely the best thing I’ve read summarising the shoe throwing incident:

Throw a shoe at me once, shame on — you. Throw a shoe — you throw a shoe, you can’t throw a shoe again.

Thanks, 23/6.

So, I know how it is.  You’re in NZ, hardcover books cost $50 upwards.  Yuck.  Want to get some of that cheap book lovin’ available overseas?  Sure you do.  But Amazon wants to charge much $ for postage, and it’s going to take 18-32 days to ship unless you pay for more expensive methods.

Hint: go to amazon.co.uk.  I’ve found book prices are generally cheaper there, and they’ll ship to NZ in less than two weeks for roughly the same shipping price as the US store.  I think it’d pay to check both stores, especially that global currencies are going haywire at the moment (in a generally not good for importing stuff to NZ kind of way.  I really do not understand how the US$ can be so strong given the complete mess their economy is in.  Guess it’s all about faith.)

In any case, the new Malcolm Gladwell book that spurred this post, Outliers, is an excellent read of the same calibre as his first book, The Tipping Point.

YouTube is always full of offerings, but the Chicken Police is my second all-time favourite.  After Western Spaghetti, that is.  I’d also like to be able to do this.  What is impressive is the guy looks like he has hands and just learnt to do it for fun.  Maybe I’m wrong about that, but if so, that’s some serious commitment.

I am really liking EtherPad.  It gives you a text document which can then be edited in real time by multiple people.  Best thing about it is that it’s really fast to set up a new pad and to share it.  I’m using it to hack on small bits of code with my workmates.

If you like being a smug ass, then Let Me Google That For You is for you.  If not, it is still amusing to play with and entertain thoughts of being a smug ass to that n00b.

There isn’t any objective way of determining where is a good place to live.  I’m enjoying London; not that I spent a whole lot of time out in it, thanks to my work and hobbies all being indoors.  But I love the sense of bigness and endless choice when I do go out, and I like the perks that a more developed economy brings at home (a.k.a. “proper Internet”.)  I’m not sure how I’m going to cope with Wellington’s public transport system if I go back.  We get grumpy if we have to wait 10 minutes for a bus.

But I have wondered whether people, in general, are better off financially over here.  After all, rent prices are sky high.  Yet food is cheaper, and you don’t need a car to go anywhere.

Here is a little spreadsheet that compares a salary in NZ to a salary in the UK.  It has a tax calculator built in, and interestingly, NZ and UK taxes are almost identical when you compare the income of two similar jobs, even though the method to calculate them looks very different.  I used the expenses of a person sharing a nice flat with two others in both NZ and UK.  And at the end, it shows you how much you have in your hand after the bare essentials are paid for.

You can download the spreadsheet and have a play if you like.  I started it off on the reasonably good retail wage of £7.50 in the UK or $13.50 in NZ.  For that example, it came out £5.4k in the hand for the NZer, £5k for the Brit.  But for better paid professions, the UK is normally ahead, and increasingly more as the pay rate increases.

Again, this is not an attempt to determine which is the best place to live, financially or otherwise!  It is exceedingly simple, and more of an attempt to get a view of the magnitude of difference.  Which, it turns out, is not a huge amount.

Well, looks like NZ didn’t get my memo about voting Labour.

I don’t think a National government is going to be catastrophic for New Zealand.  National have definitely moved towards the centre in their policies (or at least the policies they were willing to speak about), and any government would be silly to spend big bucks given the state of our economy.  I am concerned about the potential sale of state-owned enterprises to raise a bit of cash.  Hopefully New Zealanders will make enough of a fuss if they attempt to do this and not just think about lining their own pockets.

ACT being a coalition partner is more worrying.  Given National’s almost-majority I can’t see that they’ll have too much power, although National may use ACT as an excuse to push through controversial policy.  We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks.

As an expat, I give a big thumbs down to NZ media for completely failing to stream any live coverage.  One News was the only outlet that bothered trying, and their stream was down whenever we tried to access it.  You’d think that with huge numbers of people voting from overseas there’d be a bit of $ to be made from advertising directly to an international audience.

In fact, the best media coverage I found came from Scoop.  There has been an awful lot of talk about the role of blogs and non-corporate journalists in disseminating political information this time ’round.  I really wish people would stop saying “blogosphere”.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the hour or two a day that has been freed up from my compulsive trawling through politics-related sites.

There is some sweetness in the fact that Maverick County, Texas, voted 78.2% in favour of Obama.

The story of how the word “maverick” came to be is an interesting one, if you haven’t already read about it.

In other news, my voting in the NZ elections was a complete fail.  I initially sent in my vote with Bishy, who was going into New Zealand House to vote in person.  But then realised the next day I had forgotten to fill out the witness section box when someone mentioned the word “witness”.  Duh.  Went into town, talked to the election people, but it was their opinion that my first vote will have been thrown out as being incomplete, and my second vote will be thrown out as being a duplicate.  Argh.  Voted again anyway.

Perhaps if you hold the politically opposite views to mine, you would be so good as to just skip voting this year?  kthx.

I guess we all like to think of ourselves as unique snowflakes.  Stuff White People Like captures my conformance to a stereotype so closely, it’s embarrasing.  Coincidentally, we’re getting a food processor today specifically so I can make hummus.  Ah, the joys of Argos and cheap home delivery.

Speaking of the joys of London, it’s 1 degree outside and yet it is toasty warm in here.  I’m wearing shorts.  No insulation?  Never again.

A pair of obese woman are screaming at each other at the top of their lungs down in the courtyard.

Who said that?  Who said that?  WHO SAID THAT?  YOU SAID THAT!  YOU SAID THAT!  WHO SAID THAT?

They’ve been going at it for a good 30 minutes with no sign of letting up.  Impressive.  I even gave them a dirty look as I shut the window, but to no avail.  They really are quite screetchy.  Maybe if they smoked less neuroactive stimulant they’d be a) less angry or b) just as angry but at least not outside.

Happy birthday Sarah! (Clarification: she is neither fat nor loud.)