Truth in shelving

4:26 PM, July 1, 2009

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Today’s supermarket insight

12:18 PM, June 25, 2009

The active ingredients in Nurofen’s targeted migraine, back pain, period pain and tension headache analgesics are all the same: 342mg of Ibuprofen Lysine. Nothing else. Clever marketing but compromised slightly when they’re all on the same shelf and you can compare easily.

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Only Taxpayers Should Vote!

9:38 AM, June 25, 2009

A curious sentiment. Everybody who pays GST pays tax, and anybody earns bank interest pays tax. What could they actually mean?

(I’ll charitably refrain from describing the rest of the bumper stickers decorating the car).

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Post-Hangover

9:59 AM, June 11, 2009

Thanks to flicks.co.nz, we scored free tickets to a preview of "The Hangover" last night. Short, un-thought-out review: very funny. Don't expect hugely progressive portrayals of female characters. The story's going along at a rollicking pace until Mike Tyson turns up, who turns the film into a suck hole and it doesn't get back on track until he bunks off; even then, it struggles to find itself (but it does).

Since it was a distributor's preview, we had our cell phones confiscated on the way in, presumably to avoid piracy. Obviously this tactic is working since there don't appear to be any pirated copies of the film available.

Oh, really? In that case then, the film must be a financial flop due to all the piracy, right?

The Hangover hit the jackpot over the weekend, narrowly edging out Up for the top spot. The ribald comedy had been projected to trail the Pixar adventure in Sunday's studio estimates, but was revised upward once actual grosses poured in. Hangover's Friday dominance combined with a better-than-expected Sunday haul cinched its position, despite Up soaring past it on Saturday as well as being marginally ahead on Sunday. Both pictures were highly successful for their genres and wound up less than two percent apart. [...] The Hangover packed a much greater wallop than the norm for its genre, taking in $45 million on around 4,500 screens at 3,269 sites.

-- http://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=2594&p=.htm

Le sigh. Since the preview was last night (Wednesday) and the film opened today (first show in Wellington: 11:15am at Manners Mall), I can only assume they're going to continue taking phones at the front door until they're happy with the financial success, rather than as a once off ... right?

Also: why would you want to watch video captured on a phone? Can mobiles contain 2 hours of footage worth watching? Are there any copies of the film floating around actually taken on a phone?

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All is well

5:33 PM, March 30, 2009

I have nothing to say here, other than I am still getting married on Saturday and would like very much the weather to be fine and not-at-all windy.

It’s a good thing weddings aren’t hotbeds of superstition and ceremony; otherwise I’ll be solely to blame when the weather turns out poorly.

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From the "I Made This" files: Simpsons HD Panorama

10:11 AM, February 19, 2009

A panorama taken from the recently updated "Simpsons" opening titles. I want to try this with a real HD file but the only one I can find has the Fox affiliate's bug in the lower right-hand corner.

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tvnzondemand Direct Download script for Greasemonkey updated

4:14 PM, February 6, 2009

I've spent some time updating the tvnzondemand direct download script. They moved things around on the site (all the metadata is now in an SMIL file which needs to be parsed by Javascript) and a small amount of shows use RMTP as a transport but it seems to work for the rest of the site. Download it from userscripts.org.

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