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.
Was up early today. First to watch Chelsea get beaten in the English Premier League, then to watch the All Blacks narrowly miss winning the Rugby World Cup.
When my team loses, Mrs B says “well, it wouldn’t be fun if they won all the time”.
It’s not that helpful.
Last week I wrote this about the state of Twitter a year after it changed hands:
I also talked about the post on RNZ’s Nine-to-Noon radio show:
I love how the best pie or best sausage roll awards are considered front page stories in New Zealand newspapers.
I subscribe to the New Zealand Herald (I also freelance for the Herald) Of course I’m OK with that. Journalists deserve to be paid for their work. But I do find it annoying when certain stories appear on the Herald site require yet another paywall subscription. My pockets aren’t that deep.
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?
This is bad journalism practice. Not good for media transparency.
The New York Times tried to block a web crawler that was affiliated with the famous Internet Archive, a project whose easy-to-use comparisons of article versions has sometimes led to embarrassment for the newspaper.
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?
I’m sad, but not surprised to see Pebble has pulled the plug on its Twitter alternative.
The site never got past basic functionality, there was never a Pebble app.
Pebble was intended to be, and, up to a point, delivered on being, a non-toxic, calmer, version of Twitter.
There were some good ideas embedded in the site.
But it wasn’t that interesting or engaging. Pebble wasn’t the place for breaking news. It didn’t achieve a critical mass in the communities or subject areas that interest me.
I found my visits were fewer and further between.
Worst of all, Pebble was too cut off from the rest of the web. If there is a viable path on from Twitter, the idea of ActivityPub has to be in there somewhere.
And that is the lesson of Pebble’s demise: any new social media alternative needs to fit into the wider online context.
Here we go again with another cyclone potentially heading towards northern New Zealand. Thankfully this one should diminish before it gets here, apparently we may see a few over the next six months or so.
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.
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.
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
are fair enough. You’ll notice they can not be answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
Fascinating.
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.
Last Christmas Jo and I were given annual passes for Auckland Zoo that come with a photo ID and lanyard. I enjoy walking up to the entrance and telling the ticket collector that “I’m with the band”.
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?
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.