I’ve been wanting to upgrade this free version of WordPress to a proper website for a while now. If only for the improved design and plugin abilities.
So I’ve moved and re-branded. Red Armband is now NZ:RAW (Like NZ Pure but with more grit). You can see all Red Armband’s old posts on this site, as well as all my new stuff.
Check out www.nzraw.co.nz for New Zealand news articles, gaming reviews, life style stuff and more.
The new site is generally looking a lot sleeker and has much more functionality an’ all that. It’s bling. That’s what I’m trying to say. Bling.
If you’ve subscribed to Red Armband, you’ll see from the new site that there’s some whoppin’ massive buttons to subscribe to the new stuff. You can also keep up with us on Twitter at www.twitter.com/nzraw and find us on Facebook by searching for “NZ:RAW” – you’ll also notice that our new Facebook notes are looking a lot more flash.
I got to the office today and noticed a guy walking around outside in a chicken suit next to a woman handing out flyers. Apparently to save money on parking in Christchurch.
I thought that this was enough of a story in itself – what has a chicken got to do with parking? Why did the chicken park the car? Which came first, the chicken or the parking metre? It just doesn’t work.
So I took a photo at almost full zoom on my Canon Powershot S5 IS and was about to post it on the blog when I realised that the image had enough clarity to zoom in even further. I found that I could actually read the 2cm tall text on the flyer that the promo-girl was holding in her hand.
Pretty remarkable really. And now I know that the “EB” thing is all about “Early Bird” parking specials. Right.
I think they were asked to move on because they were right outside EB Games and the management probably didn’t want to be associated with a chicken.
The photos at the top of this article show: Left – the view from my window, Centre – The partly zoomed in photo that I took, Right – zooming in on Photoshop shows you can read the text on the flyer. Impressive.
Note: OK so I took the photo on the left after they had gone so I had to photoshop in a chicken standing in the mall entrance way to show you how far away they were.
Ok not really but while I was taking photos of the Christchurch Sky Lens, my cousin, Doug, called me and said “Meet you outside your office. Grab a camera.” Then rocked up in this great motor!
Doug is currently tasked with driving this mean machine around Christchurch while passing out flyers for Hotel So saying “Why taxi when you can stay at Hotel SO”.
The mini road trip seems to be working well so far. While I stood with him, at least 8 people approached and asked what the story was.
This is reflective of a lot of marketing today. We can pick and choose what interests us and block out anything that doesn’t so people have got to make it interesting.
In this case, instead of walking up to someone and forcing a flyer into their hands, people are actively stopping Doug in the street and taking flyers.
Have fun, Doug. Don’t go using your cellphone while you’re driving that thing.
This New Zealand cave has nothing to do with this story other than the fact that it is a cave.
How’s this for a ‘rags to riches’ story? The UK Herald reports that two homeless brothers have been living in a cave on the outskirts of Budapest, occasionally visited by some charity workers, and have now found out they are to inherit a US$7 billion family fortune.
“If this all works out it will certainly make up for the life we have had until now — all we really had was each other — no women would look at us living in a cave,”
Apparently a lawyer had contacted the charity and asked them to find these brothers as they were to inherit a lot of money.
Come to think of it, I have about 20 e-mails in my junk folder that mention long lost relatives trying to off-load their fortunes and wealthy South African business men looking for someone to take all their money for no apparent reason. Maybe I should start replying to a few of these.
Twitter has a function called “hashtags”. Basically, if you’re talking about an event or a particular product, you mention a word associated with it and put a hash in front. Like #WorldAidsDay.
This means that anyone can click on that word in your tweet and instantly see what other updates are talking about the same topic.
Knowing this, I decided to do a search for #FTW. FTW is a slang abbreviation of either of the terms “For The Win” or “F*** The World”. The first is used when declaring something you’re proud of or excited about. The second is more of a “I’ve just done something awesome” thing, or a “screw you all!” thing. Note that his is not to be confused with “WTF” which means “What the f***??”
Here’s some interesting examples:
So I guess with this one, Kyle is using the ‘For The Win” term in it’s most boring sense. He’s saying “Tweetdeck is nice isn’t it?”. Not sure you can get excited about that but there you go.
This would be referring to the “F*** the world” usage. A bit excessive perhaps? Would you run to the rooftops yelling “F*** you all! I left the heat on!”.
This one is … well … actually I have no clue. I ran this through the Google translator and it couldn’t associate this with a language . Perhaps it’s the language of the sort of people that photograph themselves in the mirror?
And this one is a good example of how much FTW you can fit into 140 characters. I wonder if she’s saying she’s excited about something or if she’s about to load up her M14 assault rifle and go on a rampage around town?
For an even scarier insight into the minds of the Twitter-verse, check out Tremendous News’ article on the term “OMG YOU GUYS”.
Ronald McDonald: World's Largest Scrambled Egg
- Sir Edmund Hillary
- Lord of the Rings
- Beautiful Mountains
- Sheep
- … and now eggs.
New Zealand is known for a few things and now it has an extra notch to its belt.
This morning, crowds gathered in the rain at Christchurch’s Cathedral Square in New Zealand to watch the official weigh-in of what is now the World’s Largest Scrambled Egg at 1.2 tonnes. That or they just came for the free breakfast.
World's Largest Scrambled Egg at 1.2 Tonnes
The scrambled egg used 20,000 free range eggs and was a publicity event to launch McDonald’s use of free range eggs (at participating restaurants). The 20,000 eggs were churned up by McDonald’s chefs using a variety of garden shovels and rakes.
Eggcellent.
Christchurch Deputy Mayor, Norm Withers, was there to announce the official result (Mayor, Bob Parker is probably watching his figure).
One (of many) reasons I love living in Christchurch is that you’re less than two hour’s drive from places like Hanmer.
Hanmer is a small village located between Christchurch and Kaikoura on the south island of New Zealand.
A year ago, my wife and I got married in Gisborne. So last weekend, we celebrated our one year anniversary in Hanmer.
Hanmer is well known for Hanmer Springs – a collection of thermal spa pools and a fantastic place to relax. It’s also known for its range of holiday homes, campsite and apartments. As it was our anniversary, we decided to go all out and book two nights at the luxury Village Lake Apartments. That’s the view from our balcony at the top of this post.
These apartments are operated by Cathy and Bryan Berryman. Both are really helpful and welcoming and can provide a great yarn. While we were there, Bryan spent a great deal of time crooning over his race-modified 1980 Corvette – and why wouldn’t you! It’s a really well maintained example.
The Hanmer Springs resort itself was suffering from the recent power cuts that the district had been experiencing. Some of the filters had broken and backfired their contents into the pools, so half of the pools were closed.
This was actually much less of a problem than expected. The remaining pools didn’t get too crowded and the entry fares were halved for the day (from $14 to $7 so bugger all really) to make up for the issues.
Monteiths Brewery Bar
On the first evening, we ate at the Monteiths Brewery Bar on the main road. We were served by a friendly young bloke and had a really good meal (Monteiths Radler battered fish and chips for me and Chicken Stack for the wife).
In the morning, we went back to the same place for breakfast. The options were quite limited – particularly for my wife as there were no fruit or muesli options. Having said that, I had one of the best full cooked breakfasts I’ve had for a long time. Eggs only came as fried but everything on the plate was cooked perfectly.
Peppers
On the next evening, we headed to Peppers restaurant which is basically in the car park of the Heritage Hotel (and probably gets a lot of customers from the hotel).
My wife had a great mixed seafood pasta for $28 and I had a “Duo of Canterbury Lamb” for $32. I had great expectations for this local lamb dish but for some reason, the lamb was really tasteless and was quite rare despite being advertised as medium-rare. The side of vegetables with a hollandaise sauce matched the tastelessness of my lamb.
Luckily, the dessert was very well presented and a great finish to the meal. Coupled with low-priced drinks ($5 for tap beers), the dessert and drinks made up for my average meal.
The decor of Peppers is also very attractive, although marred by some excessively colourful paintings from a local artist. These paintings really didn’t blend in well and it would have been great to see some great landscape paintings or photos of the local scenery. But maybe that’s just my personal tastes.
Springs Cafe in Hanmer
Springs Cafe
The final morning was spent at Springs Cafe for breakfast. These guys put on a fantastic, rustic, country-style breakfast. My eggs benedict with salmon was fantastic.
Before we left, we went for a drive along the gravel roads through Molesworth Station – New Zealand’s largest farm. This is a great side trip if you have a suitable vehicle – not like the guy in the 2-wheel-drive Mazda hatchback that followed us round the hills!
All-in-all, a fantastic weekend away from Christchurch.
These guys just walked past my office, heading along the freshly laid tram track of Christchurch’s Cashel mall.
The rally was organised by New Zealand’s Public Sector Union and supported by the Green Party. Sue Kedgley, Green Party MP, said in a speech to the rally:
The disability support workers, who are on strike today; the hospital orderlies, cleaners and kitchen staff, also on strike today, who earn as little as $14.62 cents an hour; Parliamentary services workers, clerical workers, school support staff, teacher aides and librarians, who are also taking protest action today and marching up Queen street tomorrow. Many support workers are working with the most vulnerable children in our schools, doing God’s work, yet they earn as little as $12.94 cents an hour -barely above the minimum wage. It is obscene.
Now I hate politics with a passion but thought that this particular subject was worth mentioning. Sue’s after raising the minimum wage from $12.50 an hour to $15 and that sounds fine to me. Good to luck to you all.
I always wonder about the effectiveness of these protests though. The French protest absolutely everything. Better transport? Shorter working days? Better garlic presses? Bring on the flags.
New Zealand though … we could do with some work on our protests.
For one thing, their chant had a serious lack of rhythm. I think the first half of the procession were chanting one thing and the second half were chanting something completely different. Although most of the chanting consisted of just saying “hey hey, ho ho” over and over like it was off to work they go with a bucket and spade and a hand grenade.
About 3 minutes before these guys drew level with my window, an overly enthusiastic flag-waver “leading” the group pointed to a man to stand up and join them. The man pointed behind her and said “I think you’ve lost your supporters”.
At that, the flag-waver turned around, realised that she’d left the group a good 100 metres behind and sprinted back to join them. Talk about keen.
Within a couple of minutes, the whole group had walked the length of Cashel Mall, packed their flags away and left. Not a single picture of a parliamentary leader was burned. Not one car was tipped over.
I wonder if these guys will get any results or any media attention. I kept an eye out for John Campbell but couldn’t see him anywhere.
By the sound of things, The Chasers War On Everything agrees with me. Check out Craig Reucassel trying to “french-up” some Aussie protests:
Spammers. Who do you think you're fooling?
Dear Saurabh,
Thanks so much for your recent comment on my article, “Improving SEO with dodgy words and pictures of hot girls” . I am writing to inform you that for some reason, your comment has been blocked by my spam filter and is sitting in a queue of 147 comments that are very similar to yours.
For that reason, I would love to discuss the content of your comment to ascertain whether you are in fact a spammer or you’ve actually just been unfairly singled out by my spam filtering system.
Let’s start with the name and e-mail address that you supplied when writing the comment. You’ve said that your name is Sumit although in your e-mail address your name is apparently Saurabh Sumitrai. Did you spell your surname wrong in the “name” field? To check, I Googled your name.
I see that you’ve set up a profile here. I also note that you’ve posted the same comment on a variety of other posts. Now this makes me feel:
1. Cheated. Imagine if I told you I loved you then you found out I’d said that to 27 other people.
2. Concerned. Are you trying to find an answer to something? Are we all just mis-understanding your comment? I’m going to try and help you out.
So:
No need of English for hot girls pictures free games boys images all local news etc by (URL) Websites can take huge profit from it.
No need of English? I think you’re trying to say “I can’t speak English”. It certainly comes across that way. I’d hate for websites to be making profits from your misfortune though. Let me know who they are and I’ll have a word.
Hot Girls Picture Method: – Press in the address bar, any three keys twice, which are together on keyboard in [7] shape e.g. (URL) [Ctrl+Enter = www. . com]. This option is working from whole keyboard. Now non English world can surf internet by (URL) theory.
Ok so there’s some kind of magic trick built into our computers? Press three keys twice in a 7 shape on the keyboard … what … like … “K, L, <”? Ok … nothing’s happening. This is supposed to allow the whole non-English world to surf the internet? Yeah I don’t get it.
Can I perhaps suggest the theory that you are, in fact, a randomly generated load of bollocks? That you’re trying to get your website address posted on blogs and so encourage people to visit your website?
Can I also now suggest that you’re doing it wrong? Why exactly would someone read your message and feel inclined to click on your link? I think that you’re suffering from a mis-guided marketing message and you’re lacking an obvious call to action.
I sincerely hope you haven’t spent money on whatever program you’re using to generate this virtual verbal diarrhoea.
I think I’ll click the “delete permanently” button on this one. Please feel free to try again. I look forward to seeing some spam that shows a bit of effort.
Christchurch Hollywood Sign
After playing around with the Hollywood sign for the WordPress logo competition, I decided to make our own version of the Hollywood sign in Christchurch. Seeing as New Zealand is such a great place for major films these days.
This is basically the view from my window every day (minus a power pole or too). I took this a couple of hours ago at 7pm. The sun is setting behind the Southern Alps of New Zealand and shadows are creeping across the Port Hills.
As the sun goes down they begin to look more and more yellow and can be quite surreal at times. I actually reduced the yellow to make this photo look more realistic than reality!
I had to remove the powerlines from the hills and get rid of the light-post and telegraph lines before I could play around with this. The un-cropped, original colour image is below, followed by the absolute original photo.
Christchurch Hollywood Sign - Un-cropped and at full saturation
Christchurch Port Hills Original Photo
