Do you think anyone in New Zealand would buy a Cybertruck if they could?
(I asked the same question years ago about the Hummer a couple of days before spotting on on the Harbour Bridge).
New Zealand’s overlooked billion-dollar industry
From my story in the NZ Herald:
“New Zealand’s financial technology sector is booming. Over the past decade, it has expanded at an annual compound growth rate of 32 per cent. That’s four times as fast as the overall tech sector.
That growth has taken the fintech sector to the point where it is roughly the same size as New Zealand’s wine industry.”
Read more at: Capital Markets Report: Fintech - New Zealand’s overlooked billion-dollar industry
I was hoping the news industry would see me out until retirement. That ambition is not looking too good today.
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.
Being tortured as a business model
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.
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.