Optus outage: company reveals what caused last week’s failure
I’m on a gigabit fibre connection. I can download a HD movie in the time it takes to pour a glass of syrah, but it looks like it will take more than 2 hours to download a 2GB Ubuntu disc image.
Friday’s newsletter went out a little later than usual, which meant it got lfewer immediate reads than most weeks…. I see a lot of regular readers picked it up and opened it this morning.
If you missed it, you can read it online: billbennett.co.nz/rural-exp…
Sustainable Business and Finance in the NZ Herald
Over the last decade I’ve written more than 300 features for the NZ Herald’s business reports. Perhaps the most noticeable change in that time is how the idea of business sustainability has gone from being a theory to being mainstream. There are few large New Zealand companies that don’t have a strong sustainability story.
Sure, you’ll find greenwashing, and it’s not always perfect. There is still a long way to go, but the progress is real.
In this year’s Sustainable Business report I interviewed Toitū chief science and advisory officer Belinda Mathers who works to certify companies as they reduce or even eliminate emissions.
There’s a story about RDT working with Auckland Airport to build a retail centre that takes sustainability a long way beyond emissions reductions.
Waste Management is moving fast to electrify one of New Zealand’s largest commercial vehicle fleets.
Law firm MinterEllisonRuddWatts wants New Zealand to get a move on building more clean electricity generation capacity.
And I interviewed Abbie Reynolds from the Nature Conservancy about looking for a fresh approach to conservation and protecting the natural environment.
Today’s newsletter includes a short editorial suggesting that a new Provincial Growth Fund would fix many gaps in New Zealand’s rural broadband and mobile coverage.
Jumped out of my skin at 8am when my loud ring tone blasted sound through the house. It was an incoming call from Australia. The caller rang three times. It would have been 6am in eastern Australia so I assumed the call must be urgent. Turned out to be a pocket dial from someone I’ve never met. They were spectacularly grumpy about being woken up when I returned the call.
A jolly good show:
In the populated parts of New Zealand you are never too far away from someone selling decent quality pies.
Wondered why I wasn’t getting responses to micro.blog posts from my phone. Turns out it I was sending them all to the test blog.
One of the most New Zealand things I can think of is how people say hello to a driver when they get on a bus and then thank the driver when they get off.
Twitter's decline and fool
Last week I wrote this about the state of Twitter a year after it changed hands:
Twitter one year on – decline and fool
I also talked about the post on RNZ’s Nine-to-Noon radio show:
Humans in Australia and New Zealand can hear I have a British accent. After almost 40 years living here, it is not as British as it was. Weirdly, voice recognition works best for me when I use Australian settings. It is as if the computer thinks I’m Australian.
What’s that about?
Hear me on RNZ Nine-to-Noon
Bill Bennett joins Kathryn to talk about how Twitter has changed in the year since Elon Musk’s $44b buyout. He’ll also look at why video streamers are pushing up prices well beyond inflation and why it might come with ads. And North Korean agents have been insinuating their way into tens of thousands of freelance IT roles around the world - what’s the danger and what are some of the signs one has been hired?
Where is Roadrunner?
Modern etiquette question.
How rude is it if I never answer those damn customer service surveys?
I used to answer them honestly, but that turns out to be a huge problem.
Trying to figure out if all the Federation development that’s been going on recently means I can now follow an indieweb enabled site like boffosocko.com from micro.blog.
Unnecessary journalism phrases
The website hasn’t been updated in over a decade, yet there is still value in Unnecessary journalism phrases.
It is just what it says on the label. The website shows the wordy phrases journalists use to pad their copy.
Each phrase is simply illustrated with a handful of recent examples, mainly taken from US newspapers.
Some examples:
Never Before Lifeless body 4 p.m. in the afternoon
Before we get carried away, many journalists, including myself are paid by the word. A few unnecessary phrases will buy a cup of coffee. Write enough and you can pay off the mortgage.
Trolling, dumb-arsed headline questions
I’m not one for new year resolutions, but IF I had one it would be to not write trolling, dumb-arsed questions in headlines.
That said, stories with questioning headlines tend to get read more often and propagated more widely around the internet. Which is a minor moral dilemma.
Some questions are legitimate. I’d argue that
- Post-Twitter: What comes next? and
- What is going on with Microsoft Surface?
are fair enough. You’ll notice they can not be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
On reaching my digital subscription limit
This week I had a couple of emails from Sky TV telling me the payment for Sky Sport Now has not gone through.
The wording makes it look as if the non-payment is an accident. That’s not the case. I want to put it on hold for a week or two while I take another look at my total digital subscription spending.
It’s high. Too high. But not out of control.
And it’s not out of control because I make a conscious effort to stay on top of spending on digital subscriptions.
In 2021 my annual Sky Sport Now subscription was $299. Last year I paid $399, but had a $100 rebate making it $299.
This year Sky wants $450. In effect a 50 per cent price increase.
That’s fine. I get my money’s worth from Sky Sports. Each week I watch three, four or more hours of Premier League football. If there is international cricket, football or Rugby I’ll watch that too. At times I also watch baseball and other sports.
So on a dollar per hour basis, $450 a year isn’t bad value.
It’s even better given that I no longer have to subscribe to Spark Sport as well.
Sky doesn’t seem to cover the Champions League and I can never be sure the cricket I want to watch will be shown, but these are not deal breakers.
So why haven’t I renewed yet?
That’s because I’ve set myself a hard limit on digital subscription spending and something needs to drop out before I use the debit card to pay for Sky. There are plenty of candidates. It won’t be long. And I can watch the Ireland - All Blacks game on free-to-air, so that’s not a problem.
What IS a problem is that digital subscription prices are rising faster than general inflation, while my income is not. In fact my income has almost stood still during this recent period of inflation. They may be able to charge more, I can’t.
Sky is up 50 per cent. Streaming TV prices are either up or soon will be. Software subscriptions continue to rise.
I get that companies want to use inflation as a way of squeezing higher profits. It’s not good, but that’s how it is.
Food costs more. Everything costs more. Many of those price rises are unavoidable. Digital subscriptions are, for the most part, optional. They are what economists call ‘discretionary spending’. I’m using my discretion and not spending any more.
I’ve already trimmed a number of digital subscriptions. Next week a couple more come up for renewal, but I won’t be buying them any more. I’ve reached my digital subscription limit.
Was confused by all the Thanksgiving posts I can see on Micro.blog until I realised that Canada has a different Thanksgiving day to the US.
Now I’m curious. Are they giving thanks for the same thing?
The bad times are back
For a decade I didn’t have a single bad debt for my freelance journalism and writing business. Apart from one or two minor administration issues, the average time it took to get paid was less than two weeks.
When Covid sent New Zealand into lockdown, the work slowed, but the invoices kept on being paid.
Then, about 18 months ago, I noticed customers starting to string out payments. The average payment time climbed. Soon after, I had my first bad debt in 15 years of freelancing. There have been a couple more since. The bad debts aren’t huge, but collectively they mean I’ve worked for a couple of months without getting paid.
It was worse in the early 1990s here in NZ and in the mid-1980s when I was in the UK. But either way, it looks like the bad times are back.
This isn’t just a whinge (although I accept it is a touch whingy) it’s about the wider economy. It’s about business confidence and investment opportunities.
Technically we’re not in a recession, but that’s not how it feels and I know I’m not alone. It’s what I hear when I talk to friends, my customers and my business suppliers.
Memo to self and anyone else who uses Apple kit:
Hang on to that USB to Lightning connector because any day now you will need to charge a device that still uses the old standard. Never mind that you haven’t found such a device yet, there WILL be one somewhere.
It could explain a lot if it turns out that Elon Musk has been testing his brain implant technology on himself.
Apple Watch has “complications”.
These are the last things I want in my life. Looking forward to when Apple Watch can offer me “simplifications”.
#Apple
Go ahead, end a sentence with a preposition
Your school may have taught you not to end a sentence with a preposition. This is a hangover from Latin and Greek. Sentences in those languages never ended with prepositions.
Years ago I worked in communications for Britain’s Science and Engineering Research Council. My boss took me to task for ending a sentence with a preposition.
He told me it was; “Something, up with which, I will not put” – a quote from Winston Churchill.
Churchill was on my side in this. I suspect my boss didn’t realise the quote was a joke.
While the grammar police won’t agree, this is a rule you can ignore. It doesn’t apply to everyday writing, business writing, journalism and online communications.
There will be times it doesn’t make sense to twist sentences to avoid ending with a proposition. Your writing will be clearer and easier to understand.
Relax. You’ll be in great company. Most newspaper style guides allow it. Most popular authors and the overwhelming majority of modern literary authors sidestep the rule.