Category Archives: Personal Rants

I am the world’s authority on Brazilian-European monetary relations

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It seems so, anyway. I wrote an article in March about finding a coin from Brazil that was similar to a 5 cent euro coin. If you search for “brazilian money euro” on Google, I come out number 1. I’ve had three hits from that.

I also got a hit from “entavos brasil”. But there’s no such thing as an entavos. It’s supposed to be centavos. But I couldn’t see the C on the coin. Presumably somebody else couldn’t either. Funny.

I’m also popular for “similar to euro” and, of course, “arun stephens” (with or without quotes). Perhaps one day I will be number one for “arun”. I’m the number 2 arun if you restrict the search to New Zealand. That’s cool.

Save Journeyman

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Journeyman is a new show for NBC this year, airing Monday nights at 10:00, after Heroes. It’s about, Dan Vasser (Kevin McKidd, Rome), a reporter for the San Francisco Register, who seems to suffer from regular headaches. Now, that doesn’t sound like an interesting story, except unlike most headaches, Dan’s headaches are accompanied by time travel. It’s kind of like Quantum Leap for the 21st century, except Dan doesn’t take the place of someone from the past. And there’s no Sam (although there is his ex-girlfriend, Livia, also a time traveller, who helps him out from time to time, much to the initial chagrin of Dan’s present-day wife).

In each episode, Dan tracks the life of someone, and attempts to put things right. He’s still learning the rules of time travel, and in the latest episode he learnt the hard way how changing history can affect the present.

Dan’s wife, Katie, knows about the time travel (Dan proved it by burying her engagement ring he was getting fixed under the deck of their house in a locked box with the newspaper from before they met), and, until Dan changed history, his brother Jack, a cop, was also beginning to believe him.

But I am writing this not to give you a rundown of the show, but to encourage you in America to watch it! Because otherwise it might be cancelled. It’s doing pretty poorly in the ratings. It does have decent lead-in with Heroes, but this second season of Heroes is nowhere near as good as the first. It’s only up against CSI: Miami on CBS and, it turns out, a new(ish) show I’ve never heard of, October Road, on ABC (up till last week it was against The Bachelor, which I didn’t know they were still making!)

Please watch Journeyman! (Especially if you have a Nielsen box!)

UPDATE: Apparently there’s a bit of a campaign to save Journeyman: See http://savejourneyman.funurl.com/ and http://save-journeyman.blogspot.com/ for more details.

Death Proof

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I’m having a field day with writing stuff today aren’t I? I’ve obviously got nothing to do, or something else to do that I don’t want to do.

I saw Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie, Death Proof, the other day. It was good. Typical Tarantino. Not as much blood as Kill Bill.

Ok, I turns out I’m not very good at writing movie reviews. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. Plus, I don’t usually have reasons for liking movies.

But most people know it had a kiwi, Zoë Bell, in it. She is a stuntwoman. Used to be on Xena. But she was Uma Thurman’s stunt double in Kill Bill. She had the thickest kiwi accent though. She did say "sweet as" though. That’s good. I was waiting for a "chur bro" but it didn’t eventuate. Two out of the other three people in the cinema left about 4 minutes after her arrival. I’m guessing it was because of the accent.

That’s the end of that little story.

It’s been a while

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That’s the name of a song, isn’t it?

I have been neglecting this blog for a while now, so I thought I’d write something new. Here is a bit of an update of what I have been up to, in reverse chronological order.

Today I decided to move my blog from Blogger to a WordPress powered site. WordPress seems to be one of the more popular and better blogging engines out there, and having Google in charge of presenting my thoughts to the world.

This week over on Facebook I launched a new application: My Flatmates (or My Roommates if you’re American). It lets you add your flatmates to your profile, and your flat also gets a page with its own wall, visible to the friends of your flatmates.

I had been working on a television application that lets you put your favourite TV shows and characters on your profile, but now that there are Facebook Pages, which accomplish the same thing but let the TV show producers control the page themselves, it seems stupid to continue with it.

I have been reading up a bit on OpenSocial, though not a lot. Probably not as much as I should be. I won’t go into too much detail, because if you care about that sort of thing you’ll already know about it, and if you don’t care, then reading what I have to say won’t make you care, but it’s an API that lets you leverage other social networks, the same as the Facebook API does. It’s implemented in orkut (Google’s social networking site, that hasn’t been very popular outside Brazil) and will be implemented in a whole swag of other sites, most of which I had never heard of until the announcement.

A few months back I started the France 2007 World Cup Picks application on Facebook. It was just so that I could learn how to write Facebook applications, but it really took off, with over 35,000 users at its peak. It prompted me to create a few other applications for other sporting competitions, but now I wish I hadn’t, as it’s taking up a fair bit of time to maintain them, for very little gain (monetary or educational).

I have also been continuing to work on and relaunch Zemobo, but that deserves its own post.

Oh, and I am also moving to the UK in January. (That’s part of the reason I have decided to work a bit more on my web site – I’m going to be looking for work soon.)

Political bandwagon

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Soon the media won’t be able take the piss out of politicians. That’s a bit of a broad statement but that’s what they’re saying.

Currently media can’t take video or photos of everything in Parliament. Only when someone is standing to talk. Well, if Parliament is open to anyone, and anyone visiting the public gallery would be able to see the goings on, then surely all the goings on of Parliament should be allowed to be broadcast to those who can’t make it to Wellington?

Public policy and the common law seem to suggest that if you’re in the public eye, you have less of a right to privacy. I can’t remember everything from privacy law, not even the Court of Appeal’s decision in the Hosking case, but surely MPs are more in the public eye and because they represent the people, the people have more of a right to see them in their element?

That is all. Nobody reads this anyway. Not sure why I bother!

It turns out my theory was wrong

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Hardly anybody turned up here after I wrote my little news report. So I am a little sad about that. Never mind.

I don’t really have anything else to talk about so I will go. It’s not like anyone is reading this anyway, right? Well, that’s not entirely true. A few people read it.

Bye!

News update

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As I just said, whenever I write about news, my visits spike. And often there is a corresponding increase in ad clicks. So I will write about some stuff in the news to see whether lots of people turn up here.

Paul Wolfowitz resigned from the World Bank. Apparently Tony Blair is up for the job, as is a New Zealander, whose name I cannot remember.

What else is in the news? Well, David Bain was released last week. That’s old news, and New Zealand only news, so perhaps people don’t care too much about that. He’s on bail, might I add. I have no idea whether he actually did it. I did read Joe Karam’s book, but it was a long time ago. The media, particularly TV3, seem to think he’s innocent. And there’s misinformation out there that the Privy Council thinks he didn’t do it. Appeal courts, usually, don’t decide on the facts. They just found that there was a miscarriage of justice in the lower courts. Not “just” as in a miscarriage of justice isn’t a big deal, but “just” as in they didn’t express an opinion on his guilt. (Not that I have read their opinion.)

Other things, internationally. Well, the US TV networks had the upfronts last week. That’s when they show off their new shows for next season to the advertisers. Upfronts is probably going to be a good visitor-grabber. People will be searching for that. Sadly, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was cancelled. Quite a good show. I think it’s back on NBC this week or next. Not sure about the day or time though. And Donald Trump just quit (before he was pushed) from the Apprentice. Apparently he has a bigger better TV show in the works.

David Hicks, the Australian al-Qaeda guy, who was in Guantanamo Bay for a long time, returned to Australia to serve the remainder of his sentence there.

Oh, and there was the first ever South African-only Super 14 final last week. Nobody cared about it here.

So that was a very useless news roundup but it’s only here for a test to see if people actually read it. Wolfowitz would be a big visitor-bringer too.

Election results

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I just wrote a whole lot and then Internet Explorer crashed because the Flash plugin crashed. That was annoying. I got a screenshot of most of it though. Perhaps Blogger should automatically save drafts like Gmail does.

As predicted, Sarko and Ségo got through to the second round. I watched TF1 and it was pretty boring. They didn’t break down results by département or anything, though the breakdown is available today. Every hour or so they had a new update with their fancy election music in the background. All the channels had a countdown until 20:00 when polls closed and they could announce preliminary results. They stayed pretty much the same all night: Sarko with 30%, Sego with 25% and Bayrou with around 18%. And Le Pen with 10% – a lot less than last time.

It was funny though. A lot of the interviewees were, when they were getting annoyed with PPDA (who was talking over people quite a bit – including his cohost, Claire Chazal), talking to him by name “Je crois blah blah blah, Patrick Poivre d’Arvor” – much in the style of “that’s not what I was saying, Paul” (or “Mr Holmes” in Winston Peters’ case).

Here in the Alpes-Maritimes, Sarko won by quite a bit (more than the average). In the first round of the 2002 elections, Le Pen was out on top here, but thankfully he was fourth placed. Many pundits think that Le Pen lost quite a lot of votes to Sarko, who, I think Jean-Marie Le Pen’s spokesperson (and daughter), Marine, described as “Le Pen Light” (as Diet Coke over here is called Coca-Cola Light). In any case, it wifi be interesting to see whether the left all gets behind Ségo and the right behind Sarko (and how the centrist Bayrou’s supporters will vote) and whether there wifi be as high a turnout in two weeks as there was today.

I got quite a few hits yesterday after writing about the election, quite a lot from France. Not sure if people were looking for commentary in English, mais mix Français, merci de venir lire mon blog !