In November Graeme bought a hard drive for his computer online. To process the purchase he was asked to email "details of your serious mumble". What? Graeme was confused and bewildered until he called for clarification. "All became clear when I spoke the words - serial number was what she was after. Don't you love it."
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Susie dished out some suburban revenge to her noisy neighbours. She writes: "We have a close-knit community of various ages. One house was tenanted by four young men, 20 to 25 years old. Two of the young men were in the entertainment industry so did not get home till midnight and then wound down after work, as you do. One night it went too far and they partied until 4am. I woke at 6am to hear some terrible country and western music coming from our neighbours on the other side of them. I immediately rang to find out what was going on. The guys had kept them and their four babies (yes, quads) awake until 4am. That was it. We turned on our classical music as loud it would go and opened all the windows. I rang all the rest of the neighbours, who also put on loud music. Then, we all also started up our lawn mowers and parked them as close as we could to their bedroom windows. The young men and their girlfriends emerged, laughing. They didn't get any sleep that day, but it was the last time they made unacceptable noise. We all ended up being friends ..."
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Many readers agreed with disgruntled Colin over the broadcast of Band of Brothers. "TVNZ was very cheeky in stretching a one-hour programme into over 90 minutes with copious advertising. I ended up watching a significant chunk of Die Hard 2 on TV3 during the ad breaks - which is a terrible movie. I hope TV One is not planning on doing the same when it premiers the upcoming The Pacific mini-series. This would ruin what promises to be a fantastic show."
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Suggestions to avoid the high cost of fancy Duraseal include: leftover wallpaper (who wallpapers these days?), old newspapers ("during the war years they were ideal; that's why we became good readers") and the clear stuff, which is much cheaper. For the time-rich, use brown paper and get the kids to personalise it by drawing on it or adding stickers. The same can be done with clear Duraseal, decorated with cut pictures.
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A reader decided not to cover her kids' books. "Last year I worked out that more than $4000 worth of plastic covering went into my child's school alone. Apart from the performance of getting the stuff on to the books, it also occurred to me that it probably wasn't that smart to cover paper degradable items in non-degradable plastic film. It never saved my son's books from major damage - nasty squashed watermelon incident - as it was the pages inside that got ruined."
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Today's Webpick: A pedestrian jumps out in front of a bus, which then swerves and crashes. It must be a viral (fake), but how'd they do it? Go here to watch.
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