October 6th, 2009 by Brad Heap
The metservice website has been doing some strange stuff recently.
Last week it was predicting the weather for the same day twice – with two different forecasts for each day.
Today it is predicting the forecast for tuesday, wed, thurs, then back to wed, thurs, thurs a second time, then finally friday.
What are we meant to believe?

Tags: Metservice, Stuffups
Posted in Just Plain Weird | View Comments
July 5th, 2009 by Brad Heap
Ha. I knew I wasn’t hearing things wrong.
From 3News last night:
“Within 90 minutes of that press conference 500 million people had logged onto staples centre dot com causing it to crash multiple times…”
http://www.3news.co.nz/Jackson-fans-scramble-for-chance-to-win-memorial-tickets/tabid/418/articleID/111252/cat/100/Default.aspx (click on watch video, 3mins 55 seconds in).
What was funny about this statement was first how insane it sounded, but then it got me thinking, this was not a live cross, it had be prerecorderd. So why did no one editing pick up on the error and do a retake of it?
The actually figure connecting was 500 thousand people. http://dailycontributor.com/staples-center-server-crash-michael-jackson-memorial/5925/
Of more interest would be if it had been 500 million. There are currently around 1.5 billion people with access to the web (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm). 1 in 3 people would have to have connected within 90 minutes. Now that would be an impressive feat.
Tags: 3News, Humour, Stuffups
Posted in Entertainment, News & Current Events | Comments Off
October 20th, 2008 by Brad Heap

Did someone put the thermometer in the freezer or something. And check out the windchill -15C and 7 layers of clothing needed… quite literally off the chart.
Tags: Humour, Metservice, New Zealand, Stuffups, Weather
Posted in Cool Stuff, Just Plain Weird, New Zealand | Comments Off
August 2nd, 2007 by Brad Heap
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10455434 The article is about broadband speeds, and the image, I am assuming here, is probably generated automatically by a text filter. Because it is talking about speeds it has inserted a picture of a police officer with a speed camera. Just goes to prove that we have a long way still to go with AI able to detect context in sentences.
Tags: Computer Science, News, Stuffups
Posted in Comment and Opinion, Computers, God and Religion | Comments Off