Bill Bennett
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.
Useful AI
I actually managed to use AI to do something useful. Not important or essential, but nevertheless useful.
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.
Everyday I get half a dozen requests from people wanting to post something on my website. Have foudn that the quickest way to stop them from coming back is to tell them the price is $30k per post.
Huawei plans a major launch
Why do so many online services, especially the AI things, want you to go through DIscord? Is there a business model in it?
Spent the morning doing urgent things for one client and totally missed another client (from the same company) had urgent things that needed attention, so wrapping it up at 8pm. 12 hour days are not unusual, but now I’m in my 60s I could do with fewer of them.
If I was a high net worth investor, I’d put some of my money into building more renewable energy in New Zealand. It might not give me the maximum return, but it would warm the cockles of my heart to know I was making the nation and the world a little better.
I’m not in any way saying it’s good that so many cafes and restaurants are going out of business, but it felt like there might have been too many even before the government got its economic wrecking balll going.
It’s a cardigan day.
When I was growing up in the south of England, cardigans were an eminently sensible and occasionally stylish way of staying warm in Spring and Autumn. Then I went to live in Wellington, where they had a negative reputation, something to do with public servants and old people.
A decade ago I froze while at an Eden Test Match during an Auckland cold snap in Auckland. So next week I purchased a winter thermal under vest. It hasn’t been cold enough since then to wear it. I’m keeping it because I may head South one winter, yet it speaks volumes about climate change.
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.
While I readily admit the four for $5 supermarket croissants aren’t remotely close to the glorious $4 each ones sold in real baker’s shops, they make a nicer change once in a while. And my word are they good for toasted sandwiches…
Call the cops.
Birkenhead New World was selling Hot Cross Buns yesterday.
HOW ARE THESE PEOPLE NOT IN PRISION?
Three games into the new English Premier League season and I’m about to fire up my prediction spreadsheet. It’s not perfect, but I was either winner or runner up in a big tipping competition for four or five years in a row back when they were a thing.
For almost 20 years I’ve been getting all notifications from Amazon in German. I ordered a German book for someone in 2005 or thereabouts so the algorithm has got me down as a Jerry and no amount of support calls, online char or mail can fix this.
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.
On Friday afternoon I was asked to make a few minor additions to an otherwise finished and agreed writing job. I was tired so said I’d get them done for Monday morning. It’s now Sunday noon and the muse still hasn’t arrived. This never used to happen to me before I had Covid.
I’ve been writing about infrastructure for the New Zealand Herald since 2013. Here’s a story from this week:
I decided a while ago that for every time I complain about something on social media, I must then post something positive. So here goes:
I got to the conference at the Viaduct Events Centre really early and the coffee that’s in those flask things was really fresh… and surprisingly good.
I can enjoy TV drama, sport and documentaries, but I simply cannot watch any kind of ‘reality TV’.
I’m probably in a minority of one here, but I can live with that.