Bill Bennett
Going by all the fuss over egg prices coming out of the US, it seems Americans start to lose it when they pay New Zealand prices for their supermarket shopping.
Between now and Easter I anticipate Hot Cross Buns will be my main source of carbohydrates. They may even be my main source of nutrition.
To my eternal shame I loaded about half a dozen AI images on to my web site as an experiment when Midjourney first appeared. I now want to remove them, but there are around 2100 pages and sifting through them looking for the offending images is tedious. I’m just going to wait until they show up.
Would like my bank to offer an option to hide my Kiwisaverer balance when I log in to pay bill. Sending money to the lawn mowing man should not be this distressing.
I had never heard the term ‘take a raincheck’ before coming to New Zealand in the 1980s. Wrongly assumed it had something to do with the weather.
It’s been a long time since I saw a stranger reading a newspaper story that I wrote. Five years at least. But it happened twice today.
Google search has become so awful that for a brief moment I considered using Bing. But no… that’s just as rubbish as it ever was. Sadly the nicer, kinder search engines use Bing’s database, so they’re not much help either.
Was tidying up some broken links on my website and found this sad, but prescient post from 2011.
I was hoping that self-driving taxies might mean rides around town without having to listen to various right wing talking points. But I guess the tech giants have a fix planned for that.
Australians and enlightened New Zealanders… is it technically possible to be addicted to Vegemite?
Because I think I might be.
It’s 2025 and our stovetop Bialetti espresso machine remains my favourite piece of technology.
I never imagined for a moment I’d be writing that sentence when I first began working as a business and technology journalist 44 years ago.
Thank god for that. One of the pains in my work life is navigating umpteen different videoconferencing systems, most of which, like Chime, are flakey and unreliable.
Excellent point here. We often forget how important WordPress has been over the years.
I still have great memories of WordPress, but it’s no longer aligned with my needs.
I’m not a soft power geopolitical strategist, but you might think that a time when the US is turning its back on allies, might be a smart opportunity for a nation like China to make friendly overtures to Australia and New Zealand instead of waving a big stick in our direction.
Today my home wireless printer decided it would print (and connect to the laptop) after three days of not connecting. That’s good.
It then printed the three day backlog of files sent to the printer. Which is not so good.
I had voicemail disabled on my phone service, but somehow (and without me doing anything) it has reactivated and I’m getting texts telling me there are voicemail messages. There are three… they are all scam callers. Which makes me wonder, did scammers reactivate my voicemail?
Last week it was: New Zealand everyone must go.
This week its: New Zealand everything must go.
I can’t be the only person on this site who hears the Imperial March from Star Wars playing in my head every time I see a picture of the US emperor… sorry, “president”.
It was almost 20 years ago when I published this Bill Bennett disambiguation page. It was needed because I was getting huge amounts of messages aimed at other people who share my name. It hasn’t been necessary for a few years now… but I’m keeping it.
Great business news intro from Dileepa Fonseka
“Poet Hera Lindsay Bird once described New Zealand as a “mean-spirited sale at Briscoes racist sexist 40% off deck furniture piss country”, and now Tourism NZ’s latest campaign appears to be inadvertently leaning into that image.”
It’s a pity the story is behind a paywall, the intro certainly make me want to read on.
Ten years ago is still made sense to talk about Windows Phone when comparing life with Apple, Microsoft or Google: