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For most practical purposes, New Zealand is a country confined to one time zone. Nevertheless, most people in business are used to dealing with the time difference issue as this country is very much an international trader. It is just part of the business landscape.

Why then is it so irritating that Auckland appears to live in a different time zone to the rest of the country? Not an actual time zone, just a different work set of work habits that have the same effect. Most of the country likes to run to a start early + finish early pattern. It gives you time to do stuff in the evening. In Auckland, people tend to start later and finish later. Why is that? It can't just be the traffic.

Yeah, yeah, I know that it is a generalisation and that there will be exceptions both in and out of Auckland. However, it does seem to be a real thing at a broad level of approximation. I'm just curious to know if this sort of same zone variation happens elsewhere.

I'm used to the bloatware phenomenon. I know that as software makers add features they make their product slower and harder to use. Not just the software on computers either. I used a hire car a while ago and wanted some background music while I got lost in south Auckland. The user interface on the sound system was essentially incomprehensible to a quick inspection. I'm sure I would have worked it out eventually but I was too busy getting myself un-lost.

So I understand the problem. Yet even so I find myself astonished by how badly the user interface on the MySky system is implemented. I had the old Sky decoder, but as a result of my recent rationalisation of providers, I was able to upgrade to the new PVR for next to nothing. The new hard disk recording function work very well, but everything else is harder to use. I mean quite literally everything. Everything takes more keystrokes on the remote and those functions which were equivalent to the old unit are less friendly - and slower. Even the remote itself is uncomfortable to use. As far as I can see, it is designed to be used two-handed - certainly one handed is very awkward.

It is the same manufacturer, so you can't blame Sky for changing to some lower cost vendor. I really wonder if the concept of usability testing has just disappeared.

A long time ago, when I was at university, I became quite the film snob. I wouldn't consider a film unless it came from some non-english speaking auteur - probably only available on a grainy 16mm print. I had it bad, but it didn't last long - John Sayles, Robert Altman and Bill Forsyth dragged me back to English. Then a bunch of SF related Hollywood blockbusters with SF themes gave me the realisation that there was validity there too. Time goes on and I find that I don't watch all that much cinema at all these days - for some reason I find most of that side of things comes from TV shows. Go figure.

But all that alternative cinema had one lasting impact - subtitles. As any of you who go to such films know, they are an inevitable part of the scene. Of course they crop up elsewhere - recently Inglorious Basterds had quite a lot. But if you watch a lot of subtitled films, there is a trick you need to learn very quickly. That is the ability to read them automatically - in effect process them as a background task while you are also watching the action and listening to the actors deliver their words. If done properly, it seems like you can understand the words being spoken in whatever language that may be. When watching, say, a Japanese film it totally seems as if I understand Japanese while the subtitles themselves never impinge on conscious thought.

Of course things stop with a jolt when the subtitles don't come up on a scene or even if they get out of sync. You can even get shaken out of the mode if you know a little bit of the language and you realise that what was said wasn't what was in the subtitles.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I cannot watch a film which is in English but has non-English subtitles. It drives me nuts trying to process the subtitles because I cannot turn off that automatic reflex of trying to merge them with the speech. It came up the other day because there was something I wanted to watch but it was only available with hardcoded Norwegian subtitles. I.e. the type you can't just turn off. I just couldn't watch it.

I eventually did get around the problem by cropping the bottom of the picture off, but that seems crude and is annoying in its own right. So what I want to know is, is there some trick for turning off the mental subtitle merging process so that this isn't a problem. Surely somebody out there must have conquered this problem before.

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else — if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!".

Or to put it another way, now that the weather has improved, I am attempting the annual assault on my "garden". A few thoughts come to mind...

Gloves may well be the most useful piece of gardening equipment you can buy. However, given the number of scratches I still managed to receive yesterday, I'm not sure who is assaulting who.

Garden implies some sort of control. The green stuff around my house is more like a Darwinian zone where woody tree-like weeds (weed-like trees) compete for dominance.

A new Day of the Triffids has been shown on the BBC. You can see why that came to mind. After watching part 1, it seems pretty well done, but I can't help feeling that it isn't any sort of significant improvement over the last time it was made. But then pointless remakes are the current fashion aren't they.

For good economic reasons, as of today, all my electronic communications services will come from a single provider. I.e. landline - including tolls, internet, cellphone and pay TV. It has been a long time since that was the case - mainly because most of the services didn't exist back then.

Why do I have this sense of impending doom?

You know that when the pilot says the weather in Wellington looks "umm interesting" that it is time to brace yourself. In the end, the more disturbing element was the low cloud which meant that we couldn't see the runway until we were right on top of it. Good to be home.

The modern country village - a cafe that looks just like one in the burbs and sells a decent organic coffee and an excellent vege quiche.

Still the country - the magazines on the rack for patrons are "Rod and Rifle".

My number geek inclinations have may have shaken me out of my blog fatigue.

For reasons not unrelated to the next episode of Top Gear I googled the phrase "passes through the andes". It gets 451,000 hits. I then googled the more specific phrase "not many passes through the andes". The second phrase search results must be a subset of the first right? I mean the first phrase is completely contained in the second - it must be more general - right? Yet the second phrase gets 2,220,000 hits.

How can that be??? Confusion.

Before you start wondering, I did work out the answer. It makes a really big difference whether you do that search with or without the quote marks. I did it without. The mental fogginess that gave me that confusion is the reason for the blog fatigue.

Must get some rest.

I've never bought a toasted sandwich from a takeaway place. I've never understood the appeal. But at the local takeaway today (buying fish & chips) I found something else that I don't understand about them. Toasted sandwiches are sold there with one base filling and additional fillings at extra incremental prices. That bit I do comprehend. But why is it that the price of a bacon toasted sandwich with an egg extra filling costs thirty cents more than an egg toasted sandwich with bacon extra filling.

So all you toasted sandwich aficionados, is this something intrinsic to the nature of the beast or have I just got a local takeaway that would send forex dealers into ecstasy?

For those of you not in the lower NI, we just had a little earthquake - magnitude 5.1, 40k west of Levin.

It says a lot about the attitude of locals that instead of getting worried or even panicked that the response of most people here at work was to immediately hit Geonet to find out how big and the other details. Even to the extent of analysing the drum traces to see if we could work out the where & size before that info comes up.

I'd love a change in occupation - I need a change of direction every few years. But, the question is what? I don't have any ideas. Except that I was reading the credits for the new series of QI and the panelists were credited as "bantermeisters". Oh oh, I want to be one of those. Where do I sign up.
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Err, I don't need to actually be funny do I?

Have I mentioned lately that I miss central Wellington. Petone has its charms, but how many months would you have to wait on Jackson st before somebody walked past in a fairy costume. In Manners Mall, it seems like a normal occasion,

There are minor irritations to the central city. Hordes of charity collectors after your dollar - I don't care how good your cause, I don't want you accosting me on the street. Then there are stores that think that pumping their music onto the street somehow makes them more attractive rather than being noise pollution.

But then sometimes something else happens. I was sitting in Abra-kebab-ra on Manners st, looking out at the mall and I could see a Red Cross collector bothering people. But then the sound from the Turkish kebab shop got to her and she started dancing to the music. A very appropriate dance it was too. Impromptu street theatre - brilliant.

I keep doing this and I really shouldn't. Somebody announces a remake of a classic film or TV series and I complain about how stupid that it will be. About 90% of the time I'm right too but even so, I shouldn't pre-judge. But this time is the worst. Well perhaps not quite the worst as it isn't as awful in prospect as the proposed All Quiet of the Western Front remake.

So what is it you ask. They are going to make a live action movie of Yogi Bear! Some sort of mixed animation & live action thing like Alvin and the Chipmunks or Scooby Doo. With those two as competition, how could I say this one will be worse. The announcement of the voice of Boo Boo being Justin Timberlake, that's why.

*boggle*

Lets see, I wonder if I can make this work...

Obviously copyright Scott Adams and all that, but I thought you might like to know where the blog title came from

I'm know the basic idea goes back much further, but when Cyberpunk hit the SF consciousness, one piece of technology became an article of faith. Well it did for me. Just as during earlier waves, flying cars and telepathy were expected to become commonplace in the future, during the '80s sometime the idea that your personal reality could be enhanced by a heads up video input took hold. The idea was that more than just what was there could be displayed - extra information or a whole other reality. And what's more, for me anyway, it didn't mean holograms or a headset - proper integrated in-body video systems was what was required.

Why mention it now? Because this article looks at the experimental reality of video display from a contact lens. This is the real thing - the base technology for an enriched visual world. The rest is just boring implementation detail.

I never did get that flying car, but I'll settle for this.

Being voiceless meant a bit of time for reading that I had otherwise been neglected. Time to make a quick note before I try to pry some space on the shelves for them.

The one I have just finished is The City & The City by China Mieville. Damn it was good. Easily his best work yet. A detective story in a pair of superimposed cities. Convincing and believable and yet alien and mysterious. This deserves to win awards.

Thinking of awards as a result of reading a bunch of short story collections. It would be hard to count how many awards all the stories in these four collections have won but it would be a very large number. In one case the collection as a whole won a World Fantasy award too. The collections were The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians by Bradley Denton, Things will Never be the Same by Howard Waldrop, A Book of Endings by Deborah Biancotti and The Fantasy Writer's Assistant by Jeffrey Ford. You might think one of those collections doesn't quite fit with the others. Don't think that, they belong together. But here is the thing. All these collections come from small scale publishers. All those awards and all the quality and all that enjoyable reading and the big guys aren't interested. I don't blame the big publishers - they are driven by what sells and short story collections don't sell in great numbers. I blame all those people who proudly say "oh I don't read short stories". People are entitled to taste preference, but I don't get the attitude that seems to go with it so often that short stories are somehow lesser things. Where did that come from.

Kaaron Warren has moved from disturbing short stories to disturbing novels. How disturbing. Well I had to take a break in the middle of reading Slights to read something else just to re-establish my equilibrium. It is subtle and powerful stuff for giving your mental cages a good shake.

On a completely different level is The Unscratchables by Anthony O'Neill which is a relentless series of dog and cat puns. A world of cats and dogs who mostly keep to their own worlds but a dog detective and a cat detective have to team up to solve a mystery. Yes it does have a plot and even a message, but what it mostly has is puns. You have to admire the way the author keeps up a steady stream beginning to end, but really...

Greg Bear has also done the two connected worlds thing with City at the End of Time. This novel of two groups connected across trillions(!!) of years is a great concept. It has certainly garnered a lot of critical acclaim which I suspect is because of that concept. Personally it didn't work for me. The idea is fine but the execution seemed scattergun and a bit sloppy. Too much vague hand waving to justify the setup.

And finally a mention of Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M Lerner. I'm betting that Larry didn't write any of it at all. But apropos of my suspicions about major authors farming out work without credit a couple of months back, it is at least good to see Lerner getting credit. It is about the only thing good about the book.

There are probably no body organs that you want to lose the use of. Obviously losing some of them is rather life limiting, but others just a bit inconvenient. I mention this only because I have lost the use of my larynx for the last week or so. Which is to say I have had laryngitis from a virus and lost my voice. It’s funny, it isn’t one of those things that you would think of as being that big a deal – the fodder of old fashioned sitcoms really. But it is bloody inconvenient – I couldn’t even ring the doctor to arrange an appointment to get it looked at when it didn’t clear up quickly.

What is interesting though is how it seems to cut into my desire to communicate in other ways. No desire to write on this blog for example. There is a lot of evidence around how our verbal functions are tied into our general social interaction bits of the brain. Perhaps this is an example. On the other hand, I lost my appetite too – perhaps there is something else at work.

But here is the handy hint of the day. If you do have laryngitis, it is no bad thing to force yourself to go to work. Once your boss & colleagues hear you, they will be so busy telling you to go home that there will be no further chance to make a martyr of yourself and you have no trouble ensuring you can take a full recovery time to get over it properly. The sound of a rasping or whispering voice really kicks in the "unclean" response. For added emphasis, I asked my boss to make a doctor’s appointment for me (see above) as we go to the same GP.

It starts like this. A visit to a large red discount house to trawl through the cheap DVDs. There is a little stack of "Great Adaptations" - a sales gimmick where the DVD of a classic movie is paired with the novel it is based on. Given the bargain bin status of these packages, I suspect it hasn't been a marketplace winner. Perhaps not a surprise given that Macbeth is one of the movie+novel combinations - I wonder what novel was hiding in that shinkwrap.

But then I spotted All Quiet on the Western Front. Score! A superbly powerful book coupled with an equally powerful 1930 movie. I'm hard put to think of a better combination although I suspect that you will all have your own ideas about that.

I finishes like this. I thought I'd have a quick look at the IMDB page for the film. Then I found this. *Shudder* I know I should keep an open mind but "sweeping Hollywood epic" and "by creating new storylines ourselves" aren't a good sign.

You know you might be in a rut when the most exciting thing to happen for days is that the supermarket near work has just bought a complete set of new shopping trolleys. It is a little bit of a surprise though. I would have thought instead of a complete change that they would just buy small batches at a time and retire equivalent number of the most clapped out old ones. Evidence, as if it was needed, that the world doesn't always work the way you expect it to.

Back in July 06, I posted this entry about some "hitching post" signs that Hutt City Council had put up in Maungaraki to encourage ride sharing. The signs are still there although some are a bit the worse for wear.

Why do I mention this? Because yesterday, for the very first time, I actually saw somebody trying to hitch a ride under one.

I would have picked him up too, but he was under the "Hutt Central" sign and I was on my way to the airport. Yep, yesterday I went to Auckland for a meeting. Not that big a deal except that some bright spark at work has figured out that it is cheaper to hire a car for a day than it is to take taxis to and from the airport to our work site in Auckland. (it is true in Welly too actually). So I pick the car up from Hertz and head out for a place I've never been to before in an area I have never been to before and I'm running late because the flight was delayed. Then I take a wrong turning.

Wasn't a problem though. I made it to where I was going with minutes to spare before the clients arrived. What I realised, is that while I don't know Auckland very well, as long as I can keep myself oriented relative to Manukau (i.e. city centre) then I pretty much know where I'm going. I knew Manukau had to have some use.

New Red Dwarf. Well, it might happen. Somehow I can't work up any enthusiasm until a definite air date is announced. But even then I wonder - has this comedy cow been milked for all that it can give?

Its all about managing expectations. When a series comes back, there is a possibility that it will be as good or even better than before. But chances are it won't. Both the show and you have changed. So best not get too excited - right?

Except that there is a school of thought that says that the journey is what counts. The excitement and joy from the expectation is a reward in its own right that may be worth it even if the show turns out to be a dud. Life needs its little gems of hope.

Nah - I'm not gonna do that this time.

It is Monday morning. In fact, here it is the Monday morning after daylight saving kicks in. Everything is running a bit slowly. Caffeine does not seem to do the trick.

So how about something to make the blood boil. Have a read of this article by Brian Edwards in which he argues that public libraries are a form of theft.

Before you ask, yes he is serious. Are you awake now?

I don't really watch that much TV. Really. Well I don't think so anyway. I pick a small set of shows to watch each season and stick with them. But at the start of each season I audition a whole bunch of the new shows that might be added to the set. I usually drop a few off as well - the networks help with that.

The set of shows this time is going to be a small one to judge by the shows seen so far...

The first lot I couldn't even sit through the pilots:
Community - sad comedy set in community college
Bored to Death - why would you call a show this, it just sets up the lines. "Sad Loser wants to be Philip Marlowe" would have been more descriptive but no more entertaining.
Lunch Monkeys - silly Brit comedy set in an office full of sad losers - The IT Crowd or The Smoking Room this ain't.
Happy Holidays - silly Brit comedy set in a caravan park full of sad losers - see above.
The Vampire Diaries - and this ain't True Blood. Not even remotely close.

There were others that were OK but not enough to make me want to watch more. Three of them are animated: Archer, The Cleveland Show & The Dating Guy. All a bit silly but not silly-funny. Archer is the best of them - also the silliest. It is almost a modern Get Smart but lacking personality.
Home Time - back to sad losers again but it makes sense contextually. Sometimes you can go home again - this time the problem is that it is just the way you remember it. Brit grit comedy.
Trinity - think Skins with a mystery story thrown in. Very pretty. Very sexy. Sometimes a little funny. Only the characters are so cliched that I can't ever see them developing the depth that Skins managed. Oh and an extra side order of cliche for the plot and setting.

Then there is Flash Forward. Based on a Robert Sawyer novel that I enjoyed, I thought it started pretty well and I can forgive the variations from the novel. The whole "everybody sees a glimpse of their future" was well done. I have a lingering doubt though. I don't think this idea has the legs to sustain a series unless they thin out the story a whole heap. I'm willing to wait and see.

There are more shows to go yet - the reboot of V is to be looked forward to. Not being a fan of the original probably helps in this situation.

It appears that NZ Speculative Fiction Blogging Week starts today. All I can say is that this seems a very neat idea and I wish I could think of something to write. Look here for more details.

So far this morning on my lj friends page, 4 announcements of the 2010 GUFF race and 3 for the 2010 DUFF race. Perhaps I should keep a tally and see how many come through in total.

Details of both can be found on the aust_sf_fan_fun community.

I wonder if it is time to give the FFANZ administrators a nudge?

These guys drove a van across Cook Straight. Some people just watch too much Top Gear.

Or it could be that I'm annoyed because if I'd known I'd have gone out to watch them land.

I don't know if I'm right but I just have this feeling. If you read the latest book in a long running series and something seems different about it, what should your reaction be. Just something off - its the same characters and the same sort of story yet the book just doesn't seem to be constructed the same. The balance is different. Perhaps the author is trying something different to jazz things up. But why would that mean a change in vocabulary when describing some common items.

You would have to suspect that the author in question is, without giving credit, subcontracting some of the basic writing duties - perhaps giving a plot outline to somebody then editing the final work. If its true, I don't know how I feel about that. In some ways, if the product is satisfactory then what does it matter - and when we are talking about long running series it is just product. But it does feel wrong somehow.

No, I'm not going to tell you the author - or even the genre.

Every so often I get the urge to remove some of the superfluous crap that clutters up my house. It doesn't last long and usually coincides with the observation that there is room in the rubbish/recycling for a bit more stuff.

Last night I attacked a drawer full of old stationery stuff. Amongst the stuff thrown away was a bunch of write protect tabs for 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. Heck, I suspect half of you don't even know what I'm referring to. I don't have any floppy disks in the house anymore - let alone the 5 1/4 inch variety. I have no idea why I retained the tabs.

I also tossed a small stack of graph paper in the recycling bin. Does anybody ever use graph paper these days or has it also gone the way of write protect tabs?

This probably says all you need to know about me.

For our larger client projects, it is quite common to have a celebration at the successful end of a project. For a significant project for our largest client, the sales person involved has organised something significant - joint celebration (dinner & drinks) with the client held in a corporate box at the stadium with a provincial rugby match* on as backdrop. It should be a big night.

My first when receiving the invitation - that sounds like too much hassle, couldn't we just have gone for a curry some lunchtime.

(*It may even be a Ranfurly Shield match but I'm hoping not after tomorrow's game. )

I was looking at the little pile of books I've read over the last week and my initial thought was what a diverse lot they were and yet I'd enjoyed reading all of them. Except I'm not that sure about diverse.

Neal Stephenson's Anathem is a huge book. Physically big but big talent too. It is stunning - a great set of characters and a gripping story. It could be an SF classic. However it does something that bugs me - it takes the weird and immensely counter-intuitive world of quantum physics and applies them to the macroscopic world. It is a fun thing to do and Stephenson has great gobs of surprisingly readable exposition to justify it but it does get under my skin for some reason. I'm happy to accept much more outlandish story devices than this but this one just gets under my skin. Hence, not classic, just very good.

By way of contrast, Horn by Peter M Ball is just 80 pages long and a fantasy - a hard-boiled detective fantasy. I've said before how hard the novella length is to package which means that you don't see that many about. Which is a pity because what happens is stories get inflated to make novel length and lose their focus. That focus is never lost in Horn.

Intermediate in length, almost exactly at the standard SF novel length, is Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams. It floats somewhere between hard SF and space opera with a bit of primitive world fantasy thrown in for good measure. Williams is one of those authors who moves about a bit in terms of the type of stories he tells. It is unusual for him to return to a type of story he has told before. Yet this time there are a lot of resonances back to a previous novel Aristoi. Deliberately so I suspect - the main character is called Aristide. It isn't the same book and doesn't seem to be written to exploit a particular commercial vein. I get the feeling that this is just an attempt to take a good idea and make it even better. I'm inclined to think that this was a successful attempt.

So no length diversity this time but World Shaker by Richard Harland is a YA steampunk adventure novel. Its a modern day "boys own" adventure set on a gigantic land machine. It really evokes the spirit of those old stories and yet it is its own thing. It really is a YA novel - if there are layers of deepe meaning I couldn't see them. But yet it is a great fun read for any age. So read it yourself before giving it to your 12 year old.

Diverse? All these books evoke their settings well and tell an adventure story in that setting. All those settings are "other". You don't have to read this genre to go to other places - but it helps.