xurizaemon's blog

Seaview Road, Piha. Or Paihia. But not Waitakere. Thanks, NZ Post.

In a flash of inspiration, NZ Post decided to change the postcodes for a lot of new Zealand's mail delivery. And to solve the confusion, they installed a Very Flash Postcode Finder on their website.
According to NZ Post's website, Seaview Road, Piha ... does not exist. Or rather, it is not located in any of the following towns or cities:

  • Piha
  • Auckland
  • Waitakere

Searching the very high-tech but not very accurate NZ Post PostCode Finder in order to get a correct address for your mail results in this:

you meant paihia

If you think you live in the cities of Auckland or Waitakere, you're sadly mistaken:

not in auckland

not in waitakere

Luckily for them, Brad - our marvellous postman - refuses to acknowledge their denial of our existence. We still get our mail.

Update: NZ Post only recognise this address if I state it as being in New Lynn, 30km away.

google map - piha to new lynn

If I give it correctly, stating the name of the actual town, NZ Post gets it wrong by 272km.

picture-22.png

pacifiers

Text of the ad reads,

"These pacifiers are second to none, I'd suck on them until I die"

Stats check: pacifiers; smoking, drinking?

From http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/07/russian-vintage-advertising-posters.html

wait, let me grab a pen

This particular dialog deserves a special place in user interface hell. It doesn't win any points back for coming from Cupertino. It scores a couple for irony alone, that's it.

the dialog from itunes hell

If you use the latest, greatest version of iTunes and dare add some MP3s or videos to your iPod which can't be played, or which are momentarily unavailable (external HD not connected) when iTunes wakes from its slumber, you will be delighted to meet this dialog.

What's so bad? This baby is straight from Redmond. It's an application-modal dialog that has an OK button. It's got Aqua (ooh), it's got an internal scrolling pane, but that's it. Does it try to help you solve the problem? Nope. In fact, it seems to be going out of its way to make it impossible to solve, and I guarantee that if you see this dialog once, you'll be seeing it a few times unless you've got a pen handy.

Unless you're the "ignore this problem entirely" kinda person, that is. It does have a checkbox for that.

But if you want to solve the problem, then you might hope that this window would give you a few options:

  • Automatically fix these tracks. (Convert the tracks which can't be played, prompt to find the tracks which can't be found.)
  • Make a new playlist of these tracks, so I can re-convert them / delete them / fix 'em up later
  • Just remove these tracks from the iPod playlist, thanks

Failing that, you'd probably expect to be able to select the tracks in that little scrolling window and copy them. Right? Wrong. (Note the ironic subtext - "For a list of items that could not be copied, click below." The programmer meant what he said; you can't copy them all, and you can't copy each single one, either.)

So. Grab yer pen. Write down the track names. And promise yourself you'll fix it up before next time.

election 2008: what will frog be doing?

i'm really looking forward to seeing nz election commentary come from the frog blog team from the nz green party have to say leading into the election this year

Syndicate content