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Amazing Grace in New Zealand

2nd January 2015 @ 6:06am – by Dave Martin
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The web team yesterday received this email from Dave Martin:

Happy New Year to you all, and thanks for the superb service you continue to bring to the village.

Returned yesterday from a month in New Zealand, so having attended a couple of the filming sessions for Amazing Grace, we then flew out and missed all the subsequent fun.

However we did follow the action on AudlemOnline, and shared the story with our various hosts down under: they were truly amazed, as NZ sports many communities our size, but they'd never heard of anything happening like this.

Which brings me to the point of this note. I tried to claim the most distant viewing record (unless the Antarctic research stations have been watching), when we were with hosts not far from Invercargill, a good 12000 miles from Audlem.

However, Chatbox really didn't like me using an iPhone to post a comment: did allow me to create a post, but then froze up. Tried a couple of times with same result, so was it me, AOL, or Dunedin beer?

AudlemOnline adds: We set our techies to work to see what the problem was as they emerged from a mysteriously hazy state yesterday morning.

At first, we thought that Dunedin beer may use a peculiar hop that somehow sets up a magnetic field that cannot interact with our Chatbox receptor codes, but it appears simple distance is the issue when messages are sent more than 12,000 miles.

As Dave will know, it's 11,869 miles (approximately) from Invercargill to London as a radio wave flies, but that extra 163.241 miles from London to Manchester where our server is based pushed us over that critical 12,000 miles limit.

When our system was developed – and subsequently updated – we never expected anybody in New Zealand to go further south than Christchurch from where, incidentally, we did receive the most dramatic news ever published on AudlemOnline on 22nd February 2011 when an Audlem couple were in the Cathedral when its tower, which they had been scheduled to visit at that exact time, collapsed in that tragic earthquake.

We are now trying to establish if any other messages have been lost from Invercargill or Stewart Island in the far south of New Zealand or, as Dave suggest, Antarctic research teams.

But in the meantime, Dave Martin gets the record being the furthest away viewer of 'Amazing Grace'.


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