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An Imagined Scene

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SCENE: A corner office overlooking the harbour. Brand Manager sits on a large chair behind a huge desk populated with executive desktop toys. Three Flunkies sit nervously on shorter chairs.

BRAND MANAGER: RIGHT, we need a FRESH new angle for our new juice product. Any IDEAS?

FLUNKY 1: What about a big orange cartoon mascot, he could be dancing aroun…

BRAND MANAGER: I said FRESH, not TRITE! Get me a COFFEE. NEXT!

FLUNKY 2: A group of attractive people

BRAND MANAGER: go on…

FLUNKY 2: ummm, enjoying the product

BRAND MANAGER: MORE!

FLUNKY 2: … on a beach?

BRAND MANAGER: WRONG! It doesn’t SPEAK to ME, and from now on NEITHER DO YOU!

FLUNKY 3: Get this: we get an attractive model and paste in our product in an awkward pose unlike any human would hold things in. Maybe put some half-ass stock-photo clouds in the background.

BRAND MANAGER: Same as all our OTHER campaigns. I need SOMETHING SPECIAL!

FLUNKY 3: OK, we photoshop her face so it looks like she has just taken a swig of the product and is now struggling to hold back projectile vomit!

BRAND MANAGER: I LIKE IT! You two, LEARN from this GUY. Lets get this out there on EVERY second BUS STOP in the city.

An Ad for Pulp Orange Juice in a bus stop.

The AT Hop Card is Finally Here

At Hop CardAuckland Transport finally launched the AT Hop card this week, eventually it will be the integrated ticketing system for trains, buses, and ferries around the whole city but for now you can only use it on the trains. The whole system is late arriving due to the Snapper debacle, but better late than never.

The old system of paper tickets had to change. On really busy trains the conductor could never get around the whole set of carriages before the next stop. On more the one occasion the train was so packed that I rode all the way from Ellerslie to Britomart without getting my ticket punched – effectively getting a free ride.

The new card works well, the readers at the stations are quick and accurate enough to read the card without taking it out of my wallet. The fancy vending machines are also well designed and easy to use.

Some of the infrastructure is a bit ropey though. The widely hyped website has some weird limitations. When you first register a card you have to wait minutes before you can do anything. Do they have a people sitting around retyping your details onto an index card? Or does the server have to send a fax to head office? At least you only have to do this once.

More annoyingly, you may think that loading your card with money in advance via the website is a good idea. Unfortunately AT Hop’s idea of “in advance” is 72 hours.

For reasons unknown it takes 3 days for the balance to be updated. I don’t know if they are worried about fraud or the bank reversing the charges due to lack of funds but surely they could float a few dollars on the card to allow travel. It is hardly the crime of the century if a couple of people ride for free especially since any master criminal is risking their $10 Hop card being blocked if the funds don’t go through. iTunes sells vastly more stuff online that you can download immediately and they don’t bother to even charge your credit card for a couple of days.

Also, the 25 cent top up fee seems like penny pinching for the sake of it considering the card itself costs $10 (half price if you get in early). I know the system probably cost a bit to implement but surely the point of the whole exercise is save money.

Thinking positively, there are lots of good points:

  • Apart from the 72 hour delay, topping up online is easy and beats queuing up at Britomart to buy a concession ticket.
  • The price of travel has been reduced, hooray!
  • Travel around Auckland is about to become a lot more flexible and easy once buses and ferries come online.
  • The automatic gates at Britomart make a satisfying sound when you Hop through.

Today was the first time I used my brand new At Hop card, and the experience was quick and painless. Despite some minor annoyances, it is a huge and long overdue improvement.

Link


Screenshot of the Scale of the Universe 2 flash object

The Scale of the Universe 2

This is very cool – an interactive demonstration of the scale of the universe, from the smallest unit of quantum length to the total estimated size of the whole shebang.

I’ve just about got my head around how big the universe is, but at the other end I had no idea that the Planck Length was so small. Now my brain hurts.

John Banks Election Scandal

John Banks was given a very important job when government was formed after the November election, a position named Minister with Special Responsibility for Keeping His Month Shut for the Next 36 Months and Not Embarrassing the Government.

Would all of you who picked 26 weeks in the nationwide pool please raise your hands to claim your prizes. Judges will be around shortly to check your tickets.
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Capturing Video at the Speed of Light

When I was a child I used to amuse myself by imagining how things would look if light moved at a few meters per second. I thought it would be cool if you could walk into a dark room, turn on the light and watch as the light spread throughout the scene. Wielding a flashlight would be interesting – you could easily make curved beams.

Now these guys have built a camera fast enough to show the same effect:

Of course, they do cheat a bit by only taking a 1 dimensional slice at a time and relying on the fact that they can repeatably fire identical pulses of light to make their images. Still this is exactly what I imagined it would be like.

Now someone needs to build the high wattage laser targeting system capable of taking out houseflies without blinding humans that I invented when I was 9.