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

Found this at Freelance Unbound -  The charm of local newspapers.

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.

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’.

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:

www.nzherald.co.nz/business/…

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.

The last technology news story posed on Stuff.co.nz’s RSS feed was on November 23.

Either the feed is broken (very likely) or the news organisation has completely given up on technology news (still likely, but not quite as likely)

Ben Werdmuller andManton Reece prefer the term social web to Fediverse.

This makes perfect sense to me. Social web does a far better job telling you what to expect, Fediverse is far more abstract.

Forget AI, VR and Blockchain, the technology that gives me the largest productivity boost is the humble RSS feed.

That and the Bialetti espresso moka pot.

What unsung tech heroes drive your productivity?

Will be spending the next couple of days covering the Building Nations conference for the NZ Herald. e

If I get irritating unsolicited email I don’t bother unsubscribing, I just send it straight to the spam folder. Many of the swine ignore unsubscribe anyway. Others use it to verify the address then trade it with other spammers. Sending it to spam trains my mail sorting algorithm and can train your mail provider so you’re doing everyone a favour.

Cognitive dissonance:

On one hand my inner music snob is appalled by the idea of tribute bands.

On the other hand, if you listen closely, a lot of excellent, well known acts are stealth tribute bands. For instance there’s a lot of Beatles tunes and ideas hidden in Oasis' best albums.

My homemade Chicken Mulligatawny soup is a favourite in our house. I worried that my recipe was too inauthentic to even be considered Mulligatawny, but apparently the concept is quite loose, so there’s plenty of leeway.

When I post a new story on my main website: [billbennett.co.nz ](billbennett.co.nz ), it pings Micro.blog which, in turn, works Fediverse magic to ping Mastodon and BlueSky.

What’s interesting is that Micro.blog picks up the ping immediately. Even when at its slowest we are talking about a few seconds.

On the other hand there are always delays going from Micro.blog to Mastodon and BlueSky. Usually a few minutes… but they can be much longer. The worst I’ve noticed is around 100 minutes.

I’d be interested if you have any insight into why this can be so variable.

Looking at the diary on my laptop, I can see I have written “save this date” on the Wednesday two weeks from now. Which is good… or it would be if only I could remember what it was that I’m saving the date for.

Have an “AI-powered” HP Omnibook for a short-term loan. The hardware looks and feels great.

This is the first time in a couple of years that I’ve attempted to get work done with Windows 11 after moving back to MacOS about 10 years ago and I’m feeling overwhelmed by Windows' built-in distractions.