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23 February 2009 @ 11:50 am
Blackout  
This Saturday, February 28th, Section 92A of the Copyright Act is due to come into force. This website has voluntarily been taken down in protest against this law, which will be used to disconnect New Zealanders from the internet based on accusations of copyright infringement, without a trial and without evidence held up to court scrutiny. May we be very clear: we do not support or condone copyright infringement or illegal downloads. But this blatant disregard towards the basic human right to a fair trial is completely unjust and unworkable and it has the potential to punish New Zealand businesses and individuals where in fact no laws have been broken. Similar laws have been rejected in the EU as being against "a fair balance between various fundamental rights", rejected in the UK due to "impracticalities", and rejected in Germany as being 'Unfit for Germany, Unfit For Europe'. We don't care who voted for the law in the first place. We just want it stopped. We call on the Minister responsible, National's Simon Power, to do the right thing and repeal Section 92A immediately. Visit CreativeFreedom.org.nz to learn more
 
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22 February 2009 @ 12:26 pm
Book meme  
Snagged from JediButtercup
The BBC allegedly believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

[bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish]

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (which IS a part of #33, duh)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So that comes out to 41 read in full and 5 started but not finished. OK some of them were required reading at high school but large chunks were voluntary - Including the complete of Mr Shakesphere
 
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08 October 2007 @ 08:36 pm
Meme-age  
From jedibuttercup

Comment on this post. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.
1: BBC documentaries, these are childhood memories. Watched with my father as I grew up, the calm authority of the narrator with my father’s additional explanations if I got lost or wanted more detail. Even now I look to them for truly informative coverage of a subject with depth but while still being interesting. Oh and this includes radio documentaries along with radio comedies.
2: Cats, I have always loved animals of all descriptions but cats particularly big cats fascinate me. Partly their regal distain for all and sundry, partly the fact that a cat is a cat is a cat. Watch a tiger, even in the wild and you see behaviours that any owner of a domestic cat will recognize.  Plus I adore my slightly demented Devon Rex, 18 months worth of fluff and energy.
3: David Attenbourgh, the first of his documentaries I remember was screened shortly after my father died. On later investigation he has in fact been making natural history documentaries most of my life. Again he has a depth of coverage and a wealth of enthusiasm for the subjects he tackles. I am about to go out and buy his “Planet Earth” series on DVD.
4: Formula 1 racing, another one inherited from my father, who was a car nut. I love the speed, the power, the sheer insanity of going that fast. I have my favourite drivers though I am included to cheer for everyone for their accomplishments. Yes, I know it is environmentally unsound and a sport of insanely rich people but it is still the pinnacle of motor sport.
5: Half marathons, to be able to train for something and still have a life. I came late to running having spent my high school years avoiding any kind of physical activity. Running crept up on me in my late 20s and while the marathon is the ultimate when you are as slow as I am training for one basically takes over your whole life. 21 kilometres you can train for and still sort of have a life. And the bragging rights are still pretty good!
6: Hospitality research, this is currently a love/hate relationship. Hospitality is in some ways an unlikely field as I have come to it as a researcher without any practical experience beyond a summer holiday working in a restaurant and far too much travelling and eating out. I love the process of defining a field, designing the investigation. Sometimes I like the data gathering; I love the analysis process and writing the first draft. From there I entirely lose interest in the editing and revision which will probably cost me my Masters.
7: World of Warcraft, the current time sink. The end of a chain of games with a group of friends and now something I play as much for my own enjoyment as most of them have moved on and got lives. A great way to work out some stress and frustration, running goes so far but sometimes what you really require after a bad day is to go and mercilessly slaughter things.
 
 
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