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Comment It was big news in New Zealand (Score 1) 74

I have a small connection to this story. As previously mentioned, one of the co-founders of Rocket Lab was the internet entrepreneur and space-nut Mark Rocket who changed his name from Mark Stevens. Many years ago, he was one of our tenants and a neighbor to us. My main memory of him is of him feeding left-over food to our hens. CEO Peter Beck set up Rocket Lab in 2006 with funding from rocket-mad angel investor Mark Rocket who became a 50% owner until he exited in 2011. Mark Rocket was originally booked to fly into sub-orbital space with Virgin Galactic in 2008 and was the first New Zealander to book a flight, but sold his ticket after delays.
I seem to recall in the late 1980s that some Royal New Zealand Air Force pilots were meant to be trained to become Space Shuttle astronauts, but nothing seems to have come of this. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... http://www.markrocket.com/

Comment Re:Benefitted from decades of Shuttle flights (Score 1) 46

There's also the much-delayed Dream Chaser cargo space plane that is scheduled to launch no earlier than May of 2025.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F... https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

Comment Re:We didn't have a computer room (Score 1) 192

We didn't have a computer room at my high school while I was there. We did programming in 1981 for our 7th Form Applied Maths class at the Christchurch Polytechnic. It was across the road from my school and we used two PDP-11 computers. We learned to program numerical methods using BASIC. I spent many hours using them on my private projects such as printing out variable-sized banners, oblivious to the fact that the school was being charged for my usage. I was the top user in my class that year, costing them $200 instead of the budgeted $50; fortunately the school didn't ask me to pay the difference. That same year our Physics teacher showed us a friend's $5000 Z-80 microcomputer that had a built-in keyboard with wooden sides and a perspex top and used a TV screen as a monitor. He was using BASIC to do some scientific calculations and wrote his own random-number generator.

Comment Re:I haven't seen this... (Score 1) 59

Xiaomi phones are available in New Zealand, but PB Tech is the only company that I know of in my city that sells them in a shop. Having had good experiences with Oppo and Motorola phones, I bought a 4G Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 recently when it was on sale for 40% off. The main reason I got it was because it has the now-rare features of call recording and auto on/off. Also it isn't as bulky as the low-end Xiaomi models. The lowest review rating was given by somebody who was frustrated at attempting to install a custom rom.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pbtech.co.nz%2Fprodu...

Comment Re:There was no race. (Score 1) 182

I'm from New Zealand too and we've replaced a few steel roofs over the years. We had a look at the roof of a house that we are going to sell and decided to just repaint it and replace the lead-head nails with screw fasteners despite it being replaced 50 years ago in 1974. If the roof is painted every few years to prevent rust, it will last much more than 30 years. There's also the thickness of the steel roof to take into consideration; we replaced our old "Marseille" terracotta tile roof with 0.55mm thick corrugated steel instead of the current minimum standard of 0.40mm.

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