For more info, check out Transition Towns Aotearoa

someone forked out the $$$ to buzz piha with a plane carrying a banner today

NO CAFE BOB GO BLOODY NATIONAL

they did about four laps and few off north towards bethells (or more likely whenuapai)

so …

• was this terse message intended for bobbie? or bob harvey?

• if it’s really for just one person, why not save the dollars and, i dunno, paint it on the road, or get some stickers printed, or …. no wait, forget i said that.

• why “go national”? are you saying a national govt would put the cafe on hold? i got the impression national were a little bit more freemarket than that, since muldoon anyway

hey, it’s election year, most candidates will promise you anything you ask for in exchange for a few votes.

fascinating … i’d love to know how much it costs to get a plane to do a few laps of piha. and how many letters you get.

i would personally have been much more impressed if they’d scooted along the back of the breakers, or maybe done old fashioned skywriting.

is it better than a few more stickers? yeah, na.

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

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.

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.

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

yes! in the mail today, a bag of treats from monkey records online nz music store

we got the following, in no particular order (except what i’m listening to right now)

the hot grits - its too drunk to be this early

i love this one. my personal fave, also the one that hunter seems to love dancing madly to (the technical term is rocking, i think) is “the ballad of josef stalin” (playing as i type). driving rhythm fun. check out monkey records site, i think it’s in their top ten downloaded mp3s at the moment.

an emerald city

saira’s fave i believe. her pal rob plays with an emerald city. lots of this on bFM. organic psychedelic sounds, which must be in season about this time of year.

the benka boradovsky bordello band - danse macabre

this one is great fun, irresistible live party sounds - makes eastern europe sound fun!

ok so i’m no professional music reviewer but hey, i’m not claiming to be. i didn’t even listen to the monkey magic ii sampler we got yet - having too much fun with the hot grits terror-funk!

hunter’s favourite so far seems to be sleepytime volume three. he’s been sucking on the cd case non-stop. (monkey records stylin organic packing make the sleepytime case the only one suitable for this kind of mistreatment - the rest of the albums are in high-fibre slips - and the monkey magic one has super beautiful artwork by will.

prize today to telecom for “we can’t log you out, the authentication system is down”

nice. (this blog is rapidly turning into a cache of stupid software messages, innit?)

i checked out iyomu today - this gave me a giggle

would you describe yourself as “not important”? it sounds kinda cool

there is actually a hidden message in this dialog, which appears when you click the button labelled “erase all annotations” in skype desktop-sharing app yugma