"I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce." — J. Edgar Hoover
The #3 bus from Karori Park to Lyall Bay at 9:05AM was full by the time it reached the CBD. For the second day in a row. It's not the first time it's happened, and it's often been like this during the morning commuter peak on that particular route. And the next bus after that doesn't come until 9:20.
While the newest buses have more capacity than the ones they replaced, certain peak routes like the #3 are still struggling to meet demand. The bus company involved, Go Wellington, have already recruited more drivers, so the only other way to sort out the issue would be bigger buses, and they're not without their own problems.
There are two types of buses that are larger than what's currently used. The first type is the double-decker, which is occasionally seen in Wellington on the tourist circuit. However, for regular commuter service, they may struggle to fit under the Hataitai and Karori bus tunnels, and their high centre of gravity may be an issue on certain roads. Also, the trolley bus wires on the main routes may not be high enough for a double-decker to clear.
The English Rose, an ex-London Transport double-decker, on the Wellington waterfront
The second type is the articulated bus, or bendy bus. While they can fit under existing tunnels on the bus routes, they would likely have issues negotiating Wellington's often windy hairpin corners, and would be more suited for flat cities like Christchurch.
Articulated bus in Bath, England
In any case, this shortage can't go on for much longer, especially if more people choose to live in Wellington. It's not too late to sort out the problem before it gets worse.
With the closure of Stratos and the impending demise of TVNZ 7, public broadcasting is an endangered species in the Long White Cloud. Even Radio NZ, one of its last remaining bastions, is under a cloud of fiscal straitjackets and down-marketing.
TVNZ 7's soon-to-be axing was justified by supposedly low viewer figures. Now that such figures have been exposed as deflated, those responsible initially tried to deny all knowledge, only to relent and publish a correction. So it probably smacks of setting up the competition to fail. But aren't public broadcasters intended to complement commercial broadcasters, rather than compete with them?
Broadcasting and media are far more than just a saleable product like a car or hamburger, they're a means of mass information and public influence, and when vested interests come to dominate it - as the recent controversy over a child poverty doco, and the News of the World hacking scandal went to show - they're difficult to dislodge. In Australia, mining heiress Gina Rinehart is buying into Fairfax Media, the publisher of the Melbourne Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Dominion Post. And given her public outbursts, somehow it's not for the return on investment. Going further back, newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst successfully inflated cannabis into the increasingly expensive moral panic that it is today.
Old media outlets are struggling to adapt to the digital age, and are making up lost ground by going further downmarket and tabloid-ish. But there comes a point where things eventually hit rock bottom.
Sure, there's still TVNZ Kidzone 24 and TVNZ Heartland. The catch? You need to be a SKY subscriber to watch them. It'd be the equivalent of the BBC archives being exclusively available on BSkyB, something the BBC would never allow or get away with.
The few local shows broadcast by SKY are mostly sports-related, and there's little in the way of local comedy or drama. Award-winning shows like Wild South and Flight of the Conchords are popular overseas, and there's a big market for serious current affairs, but free-to-air and pay-TV broadcasters alike see no money in them - or they think they're too 'intellectual' for NZ viewers. As Luke Goode wrote in the NZ Herald, such attitudes insult the intelligence of a great deal of NZers - myself included - and is symptomatic of a wider cargo-cult cringe:
"As Colin Peacock pointed out in this room a fortnight ago, it is
simplistic at best and really quite condescending at worst to trot out
the mantra that no one outside the chattering classes wants serious
long-form news and current affairs any more. He quoted Brent Impey's
quip that, in New Zealand, no one outside Grey Lynn, Herne Bay or
Parnell would watch it."
SKY has outbid all else for most major sporting events. As for competition, well, forget it. TelstraClear threw in the towel and is currently wholesaleing SKY's feed, and is yet to make good on its threat to broadcast more non-SKY content. The upcoming Igloo platform, marketed as a TVNZ-SKY joint venture, is really just another case of SKY wearing the pants. Netflix is giving NZ a miss, not just because it feels the Internet is too backward, but also because of exclusive broadcast rights issues. On top of that, Internet providers are offering data cap holidays if customers purchase preferential deals with SKY. Stephen Fry's dissing of the state of NZ's Internet quality comes as no surprise - the only surprise is that it took so long for someone of his calibre to say so.
Is it any wonder file-sharing is widely popular? Take the case of the wildly popular TV fantasy drama Game of Thrones.
There's hope yet, though. The Leveson Inquiry in Britain following the News of the World phone hacking scandal, and the Finkelstein Inquiry in Australia are conducting massive reviews of media cartel practices. A Royal Commission in NZ along the same lines would be long overdue.
My graphical take on this whole state of affairs is coming soon. Watch this space.
The moment I posted a link to my 'Modest Proposal' poster on a Dim Post blog thread about social welfare politics, it immediately caused a lively discussion. Most appreciated the homage to Jonathan Swift, but those who didn't quite see the joke reacted exactly as planned.
The whole point of satire is to unhinge the targets of its ridicule, to the point where the self-appointed Anti-PC Brigade gets rather, well, PC itself. And so far, so good. When I was at high school, classmates told me I shouldn't take everything so seriously. To a degree they were right - I've found my inner wit to be a therapeutic influence, and what better way than to invoke the spirit of Swift?
I wonder right now if Danyl, the owner of the Dim Post, thinks I'm apeing his territory. ;) More to come, so watch this space.
Today marks what would have been the 40th birthday of my dear departed eldest sister Nic, who passed away of a brain haemorrhage in late 2007.
Being the eldest of the family, Nic was always headstrong and independent-minded, and would look out for the rest of us. In the early 1990s she met and ran away with Tim, a budding geek and film-maker up north, to the initial dismay of our family. They would later return to Wellington in the mid-1990s to run a computer shop together.
When I moved back to Wellington in 2002 after finishing university, I had the misfortune to seek work during the Tech Wreck which Silicon Valley was still mired in and felt around the world, including New Zealand. I flatted for several months with Nic, and the financial distress I found myself in at the time tested our family bonds, despite working various odd jobs.
Once I found gainful employment, I eventually made up with Nic, who was diagnosed with Moyamoya disease which she is believed to have had from childhood. She was heavily involved in the local Montessori school where my nephew Connor attended, which later closed down after it ran out of money. Later in life, she composed music and contributed to Tim's film projects, including the 48Hours short film competition, where one of our projects actually won a prize. We were able to get together for a major family reunion in Queenstown in 2007, which she helped capture on video. Towards the end, she eventually managed to finish her media studies degree right before her death, and upon graduation, Connor posthumously collected the diploma on her behalf.
One of the last things I shared with her in her lifetime were some slices of orange cake I bought. Now, with Nic's headstone finally completed, I get to share some cake with the rest of our family as an act of remembrance.
How the end of the month quickly comes to pass. And plots continue to thicken.
The Mega Conspiracy, as the Kim Dotcom copy-fight is now called, has raised issues of how far extradition law should go. Dotcom has never been known to set foot in America, yet still faces extradition. A British student is facing the same situation, as has an Australian national previously.
And given that MU's servers could be imminently wiped, it's been theorised that legitimate users of MegaUpload - including some notable musicians - could open Washington DC to liability claims for lost data. It's also been speculated that Dotcom's latest project, MegaBox, was effectively sabotaged because it cut out the middleman and hence Big Music itself. There's still more heat than light on the saga so far, so it's too soon to tell.
The Teapot Tapes have finally been leaked, and there's not much of a smoking gun to speak of. So if there's nothing to hide, why misuse the police as a tool of censorship? Rob Muldoon and Sir Joh cranked that up to 11 during their peak.
The Ports of Auckland dispute continues to rage on with no end in sight. If talks completely break down, the Port will potentially carry out its threat to contract out its workforce in the name of flexibility, citing a Productivity Commission report on the shipping industry. However, they probably didn't count on the watersiders' union colleagues in London, the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), who have warned of declaring PoA a 'port of convenience' - which would essentially impose a global boycott on it.
In quake-ravaged Christchurch, tensions are boiling over with the revelation of its city council CEO Tony Marryatt - or perhaps that should be Tony Marie-Antoinette - pocketing a $68,000 pay hike, despite official reports proving his under-performance. And that's on top of the big hash he made of the loss-making Hamilton V8 Supercar event.
To add insult to injury, Christchurch Mayor Bob Parker and his hangers-on have defended Marryatt's pay rise in open defiance of all opposition and economic reality, citing 'salaries competitive with the private sector'. They're underestimating public antipathy to such cavalier dismissal at their own peril. And shooting the messenger by blaming leakers isn't helping either. Even with the official retractions - or what passes for them - it's too little, too late.
It's all a symptom of a bonus culture where those with money and power become a law unto themselves, and as a result executive salaries get horribly inflated and disconnected from actual performance. The same kind of bonus culture in Wall Street and the City of London that contributed to the GFC. Time to dust off my old Peoples Republic of Christchurch T-shirt, methinks.
The Occupy NZ crowd appears to have been evicted for good from the central parks of Auckland and Wellington. While their targets are nobly identified - corporate greed and inequality in the wake of the post-2007 Great Recession - their cause has been let down by poor execution. If anyone knows how to do civil disobedience, it's the ITF, WikiLeaks, Anonymous, the citizens of Christchurch, and above all, the Egyptian public - an obvious sign of victory is when your opponents resort to shutting down the Internet.
Wikipedia, Reddit, and a number of other popular Web sites went black for 24 hours earlier this week, in protest at the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) bills, and for good reason.
The blackout starkly illustrated the the potential chilling effects of SOPA and PIPA, which has since gone back to the US Congress for further debate. Even many of the senators who sponsored the bill have changed tack. At best it would have been an inconvenience, at worst it could have had the same effect as Hosni Mubarak pulling the plug on Egypt's Internet. And it would still have fired at the wrong targets. And isn't it just a tad unconstitutional to extradite so-called 'pirates' to America, when they haven't even set foot in the country?
In 2009, tech-savvy New Zealanders blacked out their online avatars in response to Section 92a, and succeeded in forcing a rewrite of the bill. Yet vested interests still persist in remaining set in their ways. Not least of all those who support the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), yet another exercise in cargo-cultism at the expense of all else.
Public Address blogger Craig Ranapia has pointed out that Victor Gollancz Publishing digitised its back catalogue into e-books, including many out-of-print titles. So, if old media companies like Gollancz can embrace the Internet and profit from it, then why is it so hard for the MPAA, RIAA and IFPI to follow suit? One word comes to mind - cartellisation. I suspect it's because they want to maintain a stranglehold on traditional distribution methods - and hence fix prices on the media they sell - and the Internet is a natural cartel-breaking medium. Meanwhile, bands like Radiohead and comedians like Louis CK have figured out how to make money online - by kicking out the middleman altogether. In the case of Louis CK, he hosted a live comedy show on his web site, with no DRM, and made $1m in just 12 days.
Film buffs in NZ who don't want a SKY TV subscription are keen for the likes of Netflix or Hulu to legitimately offer digital movie services in these parts. Unfortunately, Netflix has publicly stated that the Internet in NZ isn't good enough to justify setting up shop here.
And Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, two of Silicon Valley's best known figureheads, basically created their signature products by pirating ideas. MacOS effectively stole the idea of a GUI from Xerox PARC, and Windows effectively stole the same idea from MacOS. To top it off, Romanian President Traian Basescu once remarked - in front of Gates - that piracy laid the foundations for his country's ICT industry and helped its youth discover computers!
In the meantime, the founder of Megaupload, Kim Dotcom, and his assistants have been nabbed by the authorities - right here in NZ. Small world, it seems.
First week back at work for the year after the Xmas/New Year holidays, and my work computer packs a sad. Namely, some loud jamming noises were coming from the hard disk. Luckily, we had access to some spare parts abandoned by customers, and now it's reborn, bigger and better than the one that came before it. Furthermore, it was due for replacement anyway, having had the same machine for the last 5 years.
There was a time when people spoke of 'Friday afternoon cars', where a usually reliable model would not work as intended, popularly believed to be because the assembly worker involved was too distracted thinking of the weekend, and hence more careless with the finished product.
The same seems to apply to certain computer parts. Not too long ago we received a small shipment of video cards by a manufacturer of proven reputation, and the whole lot turned out to be dud. Turns out we were unlucky enough to have received a Friday afternoon batch, as the supplier informed us that no one else had reported issues with them.
Before that little episode, we had some less than stellar experiences with a well-known brand of small form factor (SFF) boxes. No less than two of them went back for warranty in the first few weeks, and a third was reported to throw a BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) at random. We practically threw the kitchen sink at the third example - the memory, hard disk, CPU, power supply and motherboard all tested just fine under our watch, even when run under heavy stress. No viruses or other dubious programs were found, we patched to the latest firmware, the temperatures all looked normal, we even steamrolled the Windows 7 installation with a new one. And yet the customer was still reporting BSoDs, even from a fresh install. We did manage to replicate the fault a couple of times, but no obvious clues could be found. Percussive maintenance suddenly became tempting.
It ended up being sent back twice to the distributor, who didn't find anything overtly wrong with it. The customer was surprisingly understanding of the circumstances, pinning the blame on the product instead of us. Finally, after extensive acid-testing, hardware disassembly and re-assembly, and re-installation, the machine finally started behaving itself. To this day, the customer hasn't come back complaining to us. Even so, our experiences with this particular brand of SFF machines has left us jaundiced, no matter how good they look on the outside. There are definitely alternatives out there.
35 years ago this month, the Sex Pistols accidentally made rock music history. For cussing in a live TV interview.
And this was the headline the following day...
Some may think, "people got worked up over a few swear words?" Indeed, they did - the above front page reported that one viewer actually kicked in his TV in disgust - and today it all comes across as unintentionally funny. But it does have to be seen in perspective.
It wasn't the first time the F-bomb was dropped on TV - that honour goes to theatre critic Kenneth Tynan in 1965 - but it was the first time it was used repetitively, and was also the first time a "prole" had used it on air. 1976 was also a time of uncertainty and disillusionment - post-war British economic stability was grinding to a screeching halt, and Vietnam and Watergate were still fresh on the public mind. And punk rock was far more than just a "new craze", it was a socio-cultural movement that harnessed widespread youth disillusionment.
Interviewer Bill Grundy's drunken ignorance - if not outright prejudice - was laid bare in the space of a few minutes. The "nice, clean Rolling Stones" never have been - Grundy was simply using them as a yardstick at best, and at worst he probably wasn't familiar with the Stones' off-stage antics. And given his disdain for rock music as a whole, he went out of his way to troll the Pistols into saying dirty words on air. It went all horribly right, with guitarist Steve Jones especially unleashing both profanity-laden barrels on Grundy. The rest, as they say, is history. And if you look closely, at the end of the interview Grundy appears to be muttering "oh shit" under his breath. Oh shit, indeed - he was immediately demoted big time after the Pistols's on-air stunt.
So how accidental was this pivotal turn of events? Well, for one thing, even the Pistols' manager, Malcolm McLaren, was browning his pants immediately after the broadcast. The following day, though, he found the guts to cash in on the whole affair.
Closer to home, the Neville Purvis Family Show was cancelled amidst controversy in 1979, after the namesake character dropped an F-bomb during the end credits. Arthur Baysting, who played Purvis, fled to Australia for a number of years as a result.
The passing of North Korea's latest Dear Leader, Kim Jong-Il, marks yet another period of uncertainty for the hermit state and its near neighbours. If it wasn't so deadly serious, the private life of the Dear Leader would look like something out of Black Adder.
Everyone knows that any attempts to re-unify North and South Korea would be a lot trickier than that of East and West Germany for various reasons. Former Public Address blogger Graham Reid has already done the research:
The divide between North and South Korea is much more pronounced than that of the old Germanys.
PJ O’Rourke once quipped that East Germans didn’t want democracy, they didn’t even know what it was. What they wanted was jeans and rock’n’roll. There is more truth in that than many would like to admit. In East Germany a generation grew up at least having some notion about what was going on in the west. Books and records were smuggled in, underground groups passed the gossip, there was some interaction with the outside world, even if it was just a radio picking up a western station or discreetly talking to a tourist.
North Korea -- the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea -- is a whole other scenario. Under the regimes of the two Kims (“the Great Leader” Kim Il-sung and now his son Kim Jong-Il aka “the Dear Leader”) the place has been steadily sinking into poverty and famines, all to the accompaniment of military parades and sabre rattling.
The vast majority of the population of 25 million (half that of the south) are rural and poor, and know nothing of life outside this crucible of cryogenically frozen Stalinism.
And Chairman Kim's nuclear sabre-rattling - including the infamous missile over Japan - had less to do with actual nuclear threats, than a desperate attempt to compensate for a very small, um, ego. And even if he could launch a warhead, would the electricity stay on for long enough?
Another interesting observation to make is that China, Vietnam and even Cuba have managed to modernise their economies under the auspices of 'communism' - as did Yugoslavia when it was still a unified nation - but North Korea has stuck with the tried and true. It seems that if North Korea is to change for the better, the best possible change would probably be inter-generational and from within, as happened with China, Vietnam, and slowly but surely happening with Cuba.
