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.
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’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.
Parts of the internet are now badly broken
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.
Pages move
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.
Missing in action
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”.
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.
If I lived in Alaska I could be working from Nome.
Had a press release today about the fancy communications technology being used on the driverless trains that will run on the Western Sydney Metro which made me realisejust how far behind the public transport eight ball we are in Auckland.
My plan is to wrap up my limited company and switch to working as a sole trader by the end of this tax year, but the amount of loose ends that still need to be tidied up feels overwhelming. That’s ironic, because reason to switch was all about making life simpler.
Watching the Carabao Cup Final in New Zealand
Chelsea play Liverpool in the Carabano Cup Final early on Monday morning New Zealand time.
The game isn’t shown on Sky Sport. The NZ rights belong to BeIn sports.
Last year my Sky subscription included Bein. This year it doesn’t.
A year’s subscription to Bein is NZ$150, that’s a lot for one game.. There is a $15 monthly option, which I was mulling over. But when I went to the Bein site, there is a one week free trial.
Bingo.
Crash from the past
Went to a company website to see its annual result. Clicked on the link, which took me to Microsoft Teams… strange, but OK, the annual result could be a video presentation and it’s possible the company is clueless enough to use Teams for that job.
Anyway Teams crashed rebooting my Mac.
This is what using computers and the internet used to be like all the time. Haven’t seen anything like this in a least a decade.
Have done the preparation for tomorrow’s technology slot on RNZ Nine to Noon.
If you are in New Zealand you can listen on the radio at 11am… but it’ll be posted online later in the day.
If I buy something then get bombarded by pleading messages for positive online reviews then I’m unlikely to ever use (or trust) that company again. If someone has to beg for positive online reviews, that’s because they know they do not deserve them.
My new driving licence photograph makes me look like I should be doing 12 years for armed robbery.
Things have reached the point where it feels like it is easier to find and watch Australian cricket than the Black Caps.
The newsletter sent out on Friday December 23 has, so far, had 3 per cent fewer openings than the average.
Have spent the morning writing to various websites, especially online forums, requesting they do a better job with site accessibility. In particular there are sites which override browser accessibility controls… that’s not good enough.