Halifax: Come back when?



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  • The real WTF is to keep using pounds, which are in the grand scheme of things even less relevant than bitcoins or Linden dollars.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Speakerphone Dude said:

    The real WTF is to keep using pounds, which are in the grand scheme of things even less relevant than bitcoins or Linden dollars.

    But still better than Euros.



  • @Speakerphone Dude said:

    The real WTF is to keep using pounds, which are in the grand scheme of things even less relevant than bitcoins or Linden dollars.

    Pff, you call that irrelevant currency? THIS is irrelevant currency:



  • Would you be so kind and send my a bit of this irrelevant currency? It'd be much appreciated



  • @msntfs said:

    Would you be so kind and send my a bit of this irrelevant currency? It'd be much appreciated

    Not while the locals here are happy to trade it for beer and other such items. Suckers!



  • @Speakerphone Dude said:

    The real WTF is to keep using pounds

    .. only if they're not made of Sterling stuff.



  • @Speakerphone Dude said:

    pounds
     

    I've been watching TV with closed captioning lately. (Due to having newborn twins in the house, so keeping volume down and being able to make sense of the show if they start screaming)

    Normally they subtitle singing like "# La la la #" but the other day I actually saw "£ La la la £". WTF? It was an Australian show and we never call "#" a "pound" - it is always a "hash". Unless some Yank came in and mentioned "pound signs" and the subtitler was being smart?



  • @Zemm said:

    @Speakerphone Dude said:

    pounds
     

    I've been watching TV with closed captioning lately. (Due to having newborn twins in the house, so keeping volume down and being able to make sense of the show if they start screaming)

    Normally they subtitle singing like "# La la la #" but the other day I actually saw "£ La la la £". WTF? It was an Australian show and we never call "#" a "pound" - it is always a "hash". Unless some Yank came in and mentioned "pound signs" and the subtitler was being smart?

    Maybe the music score was in B♭ (B flat) tonality, in which case the £ sign is a better choice than # because it looks more like the Bemolle sign (♭). That would not matter from an audio perspective (under equal temperament B♭ sounds exactly like A#) but when it is written down there is a difference. The notation for A# would be absurdly overloaded with # compared to B♭. So maybe the guy who did the subtitles is a musical snob. This sounds very plausible.



  • @Zemm said:

    It was an Australian show and we never call "#" a "pound" - it is always a "hash". Unless some Yank came in and mentioned "pound signs" and the subtitler was being smart?
     

    There was a time in UK when it was referred to as the "gate", probably an attempt to get it away from drugs connotations.

    Oddly, there was a time when the merikans called it a "hash" - the "#!" they called "hash-bang" or "shebang" for short.

    I've known American keyboards where the pound symbol (£) was in the same location as the hash symbol but the keymap translated it to "#".  Similarly, VT100 terminals set to UK locale would display a "£" would appear where "#" was (made some AIX config files look rather interesting), so I had to type "£" to get a "#".



  • @Zemm said:

    Normally they subtitle singing like "# La la la #" but the other day I actually saw "£ La la la £". WTF?
    Our Mystar used to do that, I always assumed there was an issue with the fonts on it, because after one update they were back to #.



  • @Douglasac said:

    @Zemm said:
    Normally they subtitle singing like "# La la la #" but the other day I actually saw "£ La la la £". WTF?
    Our Mystar used to do that, I always assumed there was an issue with the fonts on it, because after one update they were back to #.
     

    Around here they put little musical notes around something sung.  First time I saw that was also the first time I saw captions in different colors; it was on MTV when they were playing the video of "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?"



  • @da Doctah said:

    Around here they put little musical notes around something sung.  First time I saw that was also the first time I saw captions in different colors; it was on MTV when they were playing the video of "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?"
    That would never happen on the Mystar, as a) it's poorly made by the French and b) the idiots at Austar or who are contracted by Austar to write the firmware for it have yet to write one that actually works decently, and the Mystar has been out for at least four years.



  • There's only one currency I'm willing in invest in:



  • @MiffTheFox said:

    There's only one currency I'm willing in invest in:

    With all the Hasbro properties being made into summer blockbuster movies (Transformers, Battleship, GI Joe) one wonders when Monopoly is going to get some Jerry Bruckheimer (sp?) love.


  • @Douglasac said:

    @Zemm said:
    Normally they subtitle singing like "# La la la #" but the other day I actually saw "£ La la la £". WTF?
    Our Mystar used to do that, I always assumed there was an issue with the fonts on it, because after one update they were back to #.

    This is just on my Bravia TV from normal FTA DTV. Spicks and Specks on ABC2 to be exact. I don't have the disposable income to get cable/satellite!

    @da Doctah said:

    Around here they put little musical notes around something sung.  First time I saw that was also the first time I saw captions in different colors; it was on MTV when they were playing the video of "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?"

    I don't watch a huge amount of TV, but in general I've noticed American TV shows are captioned all in caps in one colour only. But then a lot of them are 4:3 ratio pillarboxed so maybe they are just old shows? Sesame Street is a weird show to watch because some segments are 16:9 and others are 4:3, even the newest episodes. Spicks and Specks has always been captioned in mixed case with colours for the different speakers, and 16:9 since it started in 2005. AFAIK all Australian shows have been 16:9 since about 2003.




  • @Zemm said:

    Spicks

    ... what does that word mean in Australia?



  • @Zemm said:

    I don't watch a huge amount of TV, but in general I've noticed American TV shows are captioned all in caps in one colour only.
    All-caps is for someone you can see; mixed-case is used when dialogue is coming from someone offscreen, whether just not in the shot, about to be revealed emerging from the shadows, or on a radio or loudspeaker.  Sometimes that last category is also done in italics.

    @Zemm said:

    AFAIK all Australian shows have been 16:9 since about 2003.
    That'd be a very small fraction of American shows.  We started doing TV in 1947-48, and there are still some shows from the '50s in regular rotation, so "last nine years" is but a drop in the bucket.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    @Zemm said:
    Spicks

    ... what does that word mean in Australia?

    I think it's fragments of memories. (ref) Or a word that sounds cool next to "specks" (as in a speck of dirt). We have discussed this previously.



  • @da Doctah said:

    @Zemm said:
    AFAIK all Australian shows have been 16:9 since about 2003.
    That'd be a very small fraction of American shows.  We started doing TV in 1947-48, and there are still some shows from the '50s in regular rotation, so "last nine years" is but a drop in the bucket.
     

    Still doesn't explain why a show first aired in 2010 was still 4:3: The Great Food Truck Race is the first one I can think of.

    I know Australia was relatively late to the party, starting broadcasts in 1956 (for the Melbourne Olympic games) with colour coming in 1975. Does all this make it more or less likely to migrate to a new technology?

    The USA was one of the first countries to remove analog broadcasts but one of the last to start using 16:9? I find this interesting.



  • @Zemm said:

    The USA was one of the first countries to remove analog broadcasts but one of the last to start using 16:9? I find this interesting.

    Not so long ago, in the USA, lots of people were still renting rotary phones from Ma Bell. At the same time it was possible to get a drive-thru divorce, bomb brown people with UAVs or buy a mind-controlled wheelchair. It's called asymmetrical evolution.



  • @Speakerphone Dude said:

    It's called asymmetrical evolution.

    Sure it wasn't planned by someone "intelligent"?



  • @Zemm said:

    @Speakerphone Dude said:
    It's called asymmetrical evolution.

    Sure it wasn't planned by someone "intelligent"?

    Shirley not. Much like Pennsylvanian roadways, the only possibilities are 1) totally undesigned; 2) unintelligently designed; 3) hurp derp.

    (In contrast to Pennsylvanian roadways, technological inroads into rural America are usually the opposite of government sponsored. Further, designing roadways is necessarily a government job, and as attitudes go towards such things, only incompetent morons who can't get real jobs work for the government. Hence Pennsylvanian roadways.)


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @Speakerphone Dude said:

    Not so long ago, in the USA, lots of people were still renting rotary phones from Ma Bell. At the same time it was possible to get a drive-thru divorce, bomb brown people with UAVs or buy a mind-controlled wheelchair. It's called asymmetrical evolution.
     

    They can put a man on the moon, but they can't solve asymmetrical evolution?



  • Yeah and we don't benefit from the Europe thing where your country gets bombed to shit every 50 years and you get a chance to rebuild everything better this time.

    Most of our infrastructure is older than 1945. Sadly.



  • the USA could use a good bombing, yeah.



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    @Speakerphone Dude said:

    Not so long ago, in the USA, lots of people were still renting rotary phones from Ma Bell. At the same time it was possible to get a drive-thru divorce, bomb brown people with UAVs or buy a mind-controlled wheelchair. It's called asymmetrical evolution.
     

    They can put a man on the moon, but they can't solve asymmetrical evolution?

    Who put a man on the moon? I don't think the Chinese mission to build an iPad factory there has been successful.


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