Am I alone in thinking Bing Webmaster Tools is utterly worthless or are there stealthy fans out there?
Earlier this year I looked at whether New Zealanders pay too much for broadband.
Farewell Computer Music magazine
Although I mainly worked for newspapers, I spent a few years working in magazines too so it’s always sad to see one go. This was the last what might be loosely described as personal technology magazine I can think of. It’s certainly the last title I read. While there may be a few limping on unseen elsewhere in the world it feels like the end for the entire genre.
From ten years ago on my site:
At the time Chorus struggled to pay for the fibre build.
Reading a series of movie reviews where variations on the phrase “it doesn’t completely suck” keep appearing is not filling me with confidence.
Ten years ago on my site I wrote about the launch of MyRepublic as a fibre-only ISP. The brand no longer exists.
Do you normally get answers if you submit a bug report to Apple?
I’m disproportionately cross after buying what I thought was a low priced 1kg block of Tasty cheese in my local supermarket only to discover when I got home that it is in fact a 800g block in identical packaging to the almost finished 1kg block still in the fridge. Feel cheated.
Luxon meets Modi
Of course it is good for New Zealand’s prime minister to meet Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister.
We should have strong diplomatic relations with the world’s most populous nation. And India is a major source of immigrants to New Zealand which makes meetings like this important.
Yet even the most skilled NZ diplomats would struggle to get a good free trade deal with India. There are huge potential conflicts over dairy and while India has a handful of small FTAs, it remains relatively protectionist. It is certainly not another potential China.
I wondered how cheese shipped from the other side of the world sells for less in Auckland supermarkets than the cheese made just down the road. This goes a way to explaining that:
The killer app for cryptocurrency was cybercrime. Sometimes I have a feeling that things could be heading the same way with AI.
I think we’ve all been there:
Evidence of ‘Negative Time’ Found in Quantum Physics Experiment.
Somewhat disturbed to learn multiple reminders for my company’s annual return all went through to junk mail and we are now past the deadline day.
If I offer an excuse, it’s going to sound like the modern version of “the dog ate my homework”.
You can now comment on my main website but you need to register as a member first.
I’m not collecting any data other than names and email addresses and have no plans to sell your name or mail address to anyone, but if you want extra protection you can use an anonymous email address. s
One of the greatest ever newspaper headlines
Found this at Freelance Unbound - The charm of local newspapers.
In memoriam Twitter
So. Farewell.
Then.
Twitter.
Social networking
and
micro-blogging
service.
Whatever that’s supposed
to mean in English
Keith’s mum used to
Tweet things.
Like “I had
cornflakes
for breakfast”
And other
pearls
of wisdom
EJ Thribb age 17 1/2
(with acknowledgement to Barry Fantoni and Private Eye magazine.
Fediverse update:
I’ve changed the settings so that if you comment on anything that arrives here from my Micro.blog site, the thread is archived under the original post.
You can see this in action at the bottom of A life’s work on that hard drive. Likewise if you want to comment directly on the page, you can use your Fediverse (Mastodon, BlueSky or whatever) account and the comment appears in both places.
This doesn’t work yet on my main site because that’s hosted by Ghost. For now, only subscribers can comment there. A subscription is free by the way and there are no strings attached, I’m not collecting or selling email addresses.
Ghost says the Fediverse ActivityPub features are coming, but for now all that travels between sites like Mastodon or BlueSky and the website are ‘likes’.
How Honeywell saw mobile phones in 1968
A life's work on that hard drive
There are 43187 Text, Markdown or word processor documents on my laptop’s hard drive. iCloud has another 10k or so documents that are not also stored on the laptop. Google Drive and OneDrive have around 8k and 4k respectively.
That makes a total of around 65k documents.
There are duplicates. Realistically there would be 45k unique documents or thereabouts.
Typewriter era
This is not a complete picture of my output over the years. I’ve been a journalist for 44 years. Much of my earlier output for newspapers and magazines was pre-personal computer, typed on manual typewriters.
When computers first entered newspaper offices, we typed on terminals connected to minicomputers. There are precious few files from that era in my collection.
Later I worked on publisher’s content management systems. Some of that work made it onto the hard drive, most didn’t.
In house and freelance
Roughly a third of my career was spent working in-house either full time or part-time.
There were freelance jobs that happened while I was in full-time employment. This wasn’t in any way unusual back in the early years of my career. I could write a story for The Dominion in Wellington, go home and type out a fresh version to sell to newspapers in the US, UK or Australia. The practice was not even remotely frowned on. Management saw it as being dynamic and enterprising.
Nobody does back-of-an-envelope calculations these days, but if we still did, we can see that my output works out at a shade over 20 items a week. That seems right.
High turnover
When I worked on newspapers it wasn’t unusual to file four or five stories a day.
Freelance journalists have to pump out lots of paid-by-the-word stories to earn a crust. I had a freelance job in Australia where I filled-in for someone who was on leave and I managed six a day for the first few days until the editor looked at his budget and told me to slow down.
This might not be high by modern digital journalism standards. I know of younger journalists who might deliver a story every hour, but a lot of my work was not based on press releases, but on getting out of the office and talking to people. For many of today’s journalists, it is an office job. I was initially drawn to journalism precisely because it was not an office job.
Fewer, longer stories
There would have been more, but shorter stories early in my career. For most of the last 15 years the number of items has fallen, but the individual stories are longer. These days I mainly write features.
There’s a life’s work on the hard drive. It’s archived on a NAS drive, a second external hard drive and a third Time Machine backup is locked in a cupboard. Then there is the iCloud back-up. It sounds excessive, even paranoid, but the collection is one of my most valuable assets.
My next challenge is to find a way to make better use of it. There may be a book in it or not. Either way, what happens next is another story and, most likely, another document.
It’s annoying that my phone company sends text messages to tell me what it has already told me in an email: that I don’t need to do anything because the bill is an auto payment. It is so annoyingng that I’m considering moving the account, but I fear an alternative company will be as irritating.
Because I frequently work on Saturdays and Sundays I sometimes take a half day off on Mondays. Some people get upset if I don’t immediately respond to their Monday morning calls or emails. They can get stuffed.
Call the cops.
Birkenhead New World was selling Hot Cross Buns yesterday.
HOW ARE THESE PEOPLE NOT IN PRISION?
Shuffling the streaming video options ahead of the must watch new season of Slow Horses which starts midweek on Apple TV. Have decided there is no need to subscribe to more than two services at a time, so out goes Prime… which we’ve more or less sucked dry anyway.
As an exercise I asked ChatGPT to write a short blog post in the style of my main billbennett.co.nz website.
It did an OK job but I’m not going to be put in the shade anytime soon.
I’ve been writing about infrastructure for the New Zealand Herald since 2013. Here’s a story from this week: