Bill Bennett
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:
For some reason that I cannot rationalise, I woke up today thinking about this ancient story from my website and wondered “is this still the case?” and if it is (or isn’t) does anyone care anymore? And by ‘anyone’ I’m including Microsoft.
The time a New Zealand prime minister advertised a new laxative.
Or should that be Luxative?
Short answer: American cars are nothing like as well made as European ones. Or Japanese ones. They’re not even close.
Defamatory advertising algorithms
Any lawyers out there who can tell me if I can sue Google for defamation if the algorithm decides I’m the target market for an advertisement?
I’m thinking here of the time a few years ago when I got bombarded with ads for a Nickleback concert. If any family members or friends had seen those ads on my laptop my reputation as a cool person would have been shot to pieces.
That has to be worth a six figure settlement… right?
Found an America restaurant in Auckland:
It’s only a matter of time until INEOS tries to merge The All Blacks with Manchester United.
Can anyone spot a flaw in that plan?
It could be time to cut all ties with Shopify:
Seen enough of this movie.
Now can we fast forward to the part where Indiana Jones socks Nazis on the jaw and the Ark of the Covenant vaporises Elon Musk?
I installed DeepSeek on my phone and iPad for testing purposes, but it set off so many privacy and security alarms that I now have to stop testing.
Here’s the post I wrote earlier about the AI chatbot:
This Manchester United - Leicester City FA Cup tie is dreary… two teams that look like they don’t belong in the Premier League.
It wouldn’t surprise me if I woke up on morning in New Zealand, opened the news, and found the US president had issued an executive order to reinstate slavery.
Imagine you’ve just been elected as president of New Zealand.
What would be your first executive order?
I realise some people might think this odd, but I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s trip to Jaycar. www.jaycar.co.nz
This trip is to update my Repair Cafe tool kit, but I bet I find something else when I’m there.
The social web is the web
An excellent post cum manifesto from Dave Winer who has done some deep thinking about the web in the past.
Here he encapsulates one perspective on the current state of play that many of us would subscribe to even if it isn’t orthodox thinking.
Activity.pub is fine and good, but as Winer says, it isn’t the only open protocol. Links are essential, but I’d argue the RSS feeds first developed by WIner are equally important.
Two weeks ago I needed a courier label. Turned the wireless inkjet printer on and got a label first try. Today I’ve have spent almost two hours and still the MacBook can’t “find” a printer that is physically 1.5 metres away.
If you were really committed to a Paleolithic diet, you eat woolly mammoth steaks, the sabre tooth tiger, by the way, is inedible