In my capacity as a journalist writing about business and technology I get a lot of press releases about enterprise computing. Most are incomprehensible jargon soups (and curiosly, every company sending releases claims to be the world leader in their field).
If I ever make a call to follow up one of these, frankly dull, stories , I quickly learn that the person who wrote the press release doesn’t understand what it’s all about either.
I have seen so many terrifying stories about airplane travel in the past couple of weeks that I might stay grounded for a while.
It doesn’t help that I had Covid three days after getting off a Trans-Tasman flight.
This eight year old post may amuse you:
Ailments left me with time on my hands this week so I dived deeper into Stable Diffusion, I sometimes use it to illustrate stories on my website.
Going further into the models, Loras and so on, my overwhelming impression is that this entire sector is populated either by teenage boys or by grown men who have yet to get over teenage boys' obsession over women and young girls with abnormally large breasts.
One of the most disappointing recent technology trends is, that for many modern apps, the only practical documentation comes in the form of YouTube videos. I find video is a tough way to learn at the best of times, but scrubbing back and forth when something is not clear and then being constantly interupted by nasty, intrustive and inappropriate advertising is form of torture.
Dear anyone online. If I’m unsubscribing from whatever spam you are sending me you can cut the passive aggressive nonsense and the “we’re sorry to see you go”. At this point I’ve already heard too much from you. You are in danger of turning disinterest into dislike.
Even after 60 years of watching football I humbly recognise I couldn’t do a better job than most professional coaches or team managers. Even the unfeted ones.
On the other hand, I’m damn certain I could do a better job of running clubs than nine out of ten owners. The majority are idiots.
Checking if all those cross posting fediverse things are working as they should. Please ignore this.
For reasons that I don’t need to bore anyone with, Saturday got off to an extremely slow start. By the time I made it to the local, fancy artisan baker, most of the usual choices were sold out. So I went off piste and got a fruit loaf. Which turns out to be fabulous
I think in all my years of dealing with some awful documentation, Western Digital’s MyCloud documentation and support takes things to a new level.
Here’s my go-too recipe when you need a filling, high protein breakfast but don’t have a lot of time for fancy cooking.
You can get this on the table in five minutes. It’s also inexpensive.
The name is because it loosely resembles what you can sometimes buy for breakfast in a burrito.
You need:
One or more eggs. If I’m hungry and I won’t get to eat for a long time I’ll use two. Otherwise one is enough. I use posh free-range eggs, but you can get away with any fresh eggs.
Some baked beans. About a third to half a tin of baked beans should do it. I use the organic ones that come with a less sugary tomato sauce, but any bakes beans will do. This also works well with butter beans and, at a pinch, other types of tinned beans so long as they are soft.
Cheese. I use New Zealand Tasty Cheddar cheese. Again, you can use most similar cheeses. I chop up about half a cup or so of cheese into small chunks. You could use pre-grated cheese.
Tabasco or other hot sauce.
Mix everything in a microwave safe dish, cover and microwave for around 90 seconds, give it a good stir and microwave again. You want the egg to scramble and be firm, but not overcooked. The cheese should be melted and runny.
Tip it on a plate and go.
The recipe is loose… you can play around with quantities. In fact everything about this recipe is relaxed. Feel free to use it as a jumping off point.
The political right use the term ‘woke’ in the way that communists would use the word ‘bourgeois’ to signify “things and people we don’t like and who had better watch out”.
It has the advantage of being easier to spell. That’s important give the education cuts.
Should change the Orwellian supermarket’s name to
New World Order
Apple Music’s categorisation of my library is a wild ride….
Politicians’ salaries should be index linked by law to ordinary people’s income levels. It can be set at a higher levels, but it should rise (or fall} in line with everyone else.
I never respond to Linkedin connect requests from people I have never heard of because, as we say in New Zealand, I’m up myself.
I’m surprised at how many people complain about daylight saving. Don’t remember it being so controversial in the past.
End of daylight saving has played havoc with my appetite. It’s like jet lag, I didn’t feel hungry last night or this morning, now I’m ravenous.
“Atmospheric river” will be the title of my next album.
Every month I open up the excellent Integrity app on my MacBook.
It crawls my main, work-related website at billbennett.co.nz looking for broken links. Every month there are a dozen or so new broken links. That is, the links that my website points to are no longer there.
This month there were eight new broken links. There are 1250 pages on the site and more than 4000 links. In round numbers, about two to three percent of links from my site disappear every year.
Three or four times as many links move to a different URL, sometimes many more have a change of address. This is annoying, but it is fixable.
The dead URLs are more of a problem. Much of the time all I can do is remove the link from my pages and, perhaps, indicate that there was a link, but the page at the other end has since vapourised. Sometimes I can point to the page at the internet archive.
At the moment a few hundred of the 4000 or so outgoing links on my site point to the Internet Archive. It can be slow and difficult to reach, but it is an excellent resource. When I’m feelingn flush, I donate a few dollars to keep it going.
Sometimes pages disappear for good reasons. The company or publication is no longer in business so there’s no-one to pay the hosting bills. Often, it’s just an annoying business practice of purging old pages more or less for the sake of it. Contrary to popular wisdom, purging old pages doesn’t tend to help with search engine optimisation in general.
There are those site owners who prefer to wipe or rewrite history. Whatever.
What is clear is thsat the number of linkable pages is in decline. At one point my site linked to more than twice as many external pages. That’s dropped over time and I appear to be removing links faster than I add new ones.
Conversation:
“Tell me somethihng few people know about you”.
“I am New Zealand’s leading vampire hunter”.
“But New Zealand doesn’t have any vampires”.
“I’m very good at it”.
Had a roll mop herring for breakfast. My wife thinks I’m odd. but to me this is breakfast of the gods… (most likely the Norse gods).
It’s not normally a wrench when a review period comes to an end and I pack the hardware to send back. But I’m going to miss the 16 inch MacBook Pro. It’s big enough for productivity, small enough to carry about. For me it hits the sweet spot.
Was on RNZ Nine to Noon this morning talking about why making tech giants pay media companies is unlikely to save news operations at places like NewsHub, TVNZ or anywhere else.
There’s no direct link yet, but you can find it on this page:
My grandmother’s name was Edith, but on Sundays it was Mary.
I never knew if that was some kind of in-joke that my grandparents had or some weird hangover from Edwardian London.