I bought Steven Parissien’s The Life of the Automobile: a New History of the Motor Car, which started off as a good history. I’m 300-odd pages in now and the mistakes are really worrying. There’s also a shocking lack of editing (one part repeated, albeit in different language, and spelling and grammatical mistakes) in the parts I’ve got to now; it’s as though the editor got tired after the first 10 chapters and stopped caring. But the biggest errors are factual.
   I am astonished to learn, for instance, that Harley Earl was responsible for the concept of the Ford Thunderbird (p. 255), that Triumph TR7 production was transferred to Speke in 1982 (p. 293, though Parissien later contradicts himself with the correct fact), and that John Z. de Lorean was a protégé of Lee Iacocca (p. 309). I really have no idea how, but as far as I know, de Lorean was never at Ford, and he had a Chrysler stint long before Iacocca got there. I also never knew that ‘In 1968 the Toyota Corolla became the first Japanese car to be manufactured in the US’ (p. 314; that was the year it went on sale there, and from memory the Corolla didn’t get built there till the NUMMI deal in the 1980s) or that the Opel Ascona C was also sold as the Opel Vectra (p. 337).
   I am frustrated with this book—and now it makes me wonder if the stuff earlier on, which I know less about, was accurate.
   I can understand an editor not grasping the subject as well as the author but there is less excuse in professional publishing for the other problems. Maybe there are few professional proofreaders left, now that spellchecks have been around for a generation or more. I was prepared to recommend this book even a week ago and tolerated the spelling and grammar, but these factual mistakes are worse than what can be found in Wikipedia, and I often label parts of that site as fiction.

Hong Kong’s skyline in 2008, photographed by Scrolllock.

Has it been 20 years since Dad and I sat in front of the telly to watch both Britannia sail out of the harbour and China set off a magnificent fireworks’ display to celebrate getting Hong Kong becoming one of her possessions again?
   Following some of the 20th anniversary commemorations through the media, notably the BBC World Service which followed them keenly, I had very mixed feelings.
   Having been born British in the then-colony (whilst cheering the All Blacks today, natch) I have some nostalgia for the Hong Kong of old. If it weren’t for some aspects of colonialism, my mother wouldn’t have secured a decent job at Wellington Hospital (viz. an English and Welsh qualification) and I probably would never have learned English before the age of three. It all helped.
   It was the spectre of 1997, specifically the fear of what the Communists would do after July 1, 1997, that prompted my parents to make plans to emigrate as early as the 1970s.
   Of course, history as shown that largely those fears have not come to pass, although the Umbrella Revolution highlights that universal suffrage is not a reality in the city.
   In a post-Brexit (or at least a post-Brexit vote) era, these past two decades also highlight that British nationalism is meaningless and little more than a tool for politicians to yield for propaganda.
   You can fairly argue that that is what nationalism always has been. It could also equally be argued that nationalism is founded on some rose-coloured-glasses past, painting a picture that actually never existed.
   American nostalgia looks back at a 1950s’ economic boom while ignoring segregation while British nostalgia shows a child pushing his bike up a hill to Dvořák’s New World Symphony.
   Brexiters, rightly or wrongly, want to reassert a British self-determination founded on a British national character.
   Most Britons I talked to, regardless of their politics, agree that if you are Hong Kong British, then you are British. That should be some solace to the families of those HKers who lost their lives fighting under the Crown in both World War II and the Falklands.
   Yet there is no reality to this claim when it comes to government. Fearful of an influx of Hong Kong British emigrating to the UK, the British National (Overseas) category was invented in 1985, to replace our previous status as Citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies. It didn’t do the wealthy any harm, mind: a lot went to Canada and Australia and took their money there. Others stayed and invested in China, and helped fuel the growth of Shenzhen as a technological powerhouse. The Hong Kong Chinese person is generally industrious, many having descended from refugees from China in 1949 who decided to make the most of the freedoms in the colony. That work ethic was certainly nothing any Briton in the UK needed to fear, yet somehow we were classed as Johnny Foreigner.
   When I went to the UK in 2001 with that BN(O) passport, I had terrible trouble at immigration, denied entry when queued up with other British subjects. I wound up at the back of the queue with some white South Africans, who were less than impressed and said, ‘But that’s apartheid.’ Correspondence to the High Commission, Foreign Secretary, and Shadow Foreign Secretary went unanswered, though I did get a response from the PM.
   In other words, the fears within Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech held more sway in Blair’s Britain than any sacrifice in the Falklands (even if, I should point out, Powell was not addressing immigration per se). Today, I wonder if they still do.
   The Tiber was greater than the Atlantic.
   Labour were quick to point out how wrong the Tories were with BN(O) back in the 1980s, but in 2001, Labour wasn’t working.
   Robin Cook, the Foreign Secretary, said at the time of the handover in 1997 that Britain would ‘walk with you’, that Britain had won assurances that elections in Hong Kong would be free and fair, and that if China ever failed to live up to this pledge, Britain would take the matter to the United Nations under the Sino-British Joint Declaration.
   In 20 years, Britain has not lifted a finger.
   We might get lucky like the Gurkhas one of these days if Joanna Lumley wants to come to our aid. But we certainly can’t rely on any politician.
   Being British (I retained my nationality and applied before the deadline to be a BN(O)), you can see how the pro-Brexit position was hard to stomach to me. The likes of Nigel Farage and the “other” New York-born politician with funny hair, Boris Johnson, seemed to revel in some idea of British unity, but anyone from Hong Kong will tell you that in politics, that is an empty concept.
   Only one of my friends who was pro-Brexit voted based on the idea of an independent Britain being more efficient when freed from the whims of Brussels, and I respect him for it; most of what I saw was aimed against immigration. The current PM’s belief in safeguarding the interests of British subjects should be cold comfort to those affected: if they couldn’t defend our interests, will others fare any better, especially with a minority government in a Conservative Party that actually remains as divided as ever?
   Not that I am championing the People’s Republic of China for its handling of relations between mainlanders and Hong Kongers; it has equally been exclusive of us and our unique culture. I have already gone into the Umbrella Revolution elsewhere (even if the TV One website omitted my televised comments about Wikileaks’ reporting of US State Department interference as this goes against the western narrative), and this doesn’t need exploring again. The disappearance of publishers critical of Beijing should sound alarm bells—I note that one of them was a British subject, but the best the UK could muster was an expression of concern. I cannot help but wonder if this is the fate that awaits Britons on the Continent should something happen to them.
   Some negatives aside, I am happy that when I visited a “Chinese” Hong Kong in 2006, I found a city whose character was intact, and I remarked at how unchanged that was. In subsequent visits in 2008, 2010 and 2012, that core remained. Given all the paranoia before 1997, ‘One country, two systems’ has certainly not been as bad as many of us—including those of us who moved our entire lives abroad because of those fears—predicted. I wish all HKers well on this 20th anniversary.

The Porsche 901 was the 3,500th model entry into Autocade earlier this month.

After lamenting in February that it had taken over six months for Autocade to get from 9,000,000 to 10,000,000 page views (prior to that it was every five months), I was happy to note that the next million took four months, which is a new record for the website.

March 2008: launch
April 2011: 1,000,000 (three years for first million)
March 2012: 2,000,000 (11 months for second million)
May 2013: 3,000,000 (14 months for third million)
January 2014: 4,000,000 (eight months for fourth million)
September 2014: 5,000,000 (eight months for fifth million)
May 2015: 6,000,000 (eight months for sixth million)
October 2015: 7,000,000 (five months for seventh million)
March 2016: 8,000,000 (five months for eighth million)
August 2016: 9,000,000 (five months for ninth million)
February 2017: 10,000,000 (six months for tenth million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for eleventh million)

   Just yesterday I spotted another fiction on Wikipedia—that the original Hyundai Sonata, which we know was not sold outside Korea, is claimed to have been sold in Canada and New Zealand. (The Stellar-based one was not; the first Sonata sold for export was the Y2.)
   As long as unreferenced fictions like this keep appearing on Wikipedia—I don’t have to repeat earlier ones I noted, such as the ongoing, and annoying, falsehood of the ‘Ford CE14 platform’ page—there’s a place for Autocade. In fact, the additional growth suggests to me that the site is being used more regularly by netizens, and I hope that the work we’ve put in has been useful and entertaining.
   Our 3,500th entry, made on June 3, 2017, was for the Porsche 901 (unlike many other times, I had purposely chosen it).
   We’re not completely error-free, but we try to reference everything with offline sources, and, where appropriate, online (non-Wikipedia) ones. Thank you for your visits and for putting your trust in us.

What an honour it was to appear as one of the first batch of people in the Human Rights’ Commission’s Give Nothing to Racism campaign. Taika Waititi, New Zealander of the Year (and a Lucire feature interviewee from way back) introduced the campaign with a hilarious video, and it was an honour to be considered alongside my old classmate Karl Urban, and other famous people such as Sonny Bill Williams, Sam Neill, Neil Finn, Lucy Lawless, and Hollie Smith. Somewhere along the line the Commission decided it would get some non-celebs like me.
   The idea is that racism propagates through each of us. Laughing along with a joke. Letting casual racism in social media comments carry on. Excusing racist behaviour. Or simply accepting it as “the way it is”. There’s no place for it in 2017, certainly not in this country, and for those who seek to indulge in it (I’m looking at certain people in politics and the media in particular), you’re simply covering up the fact you’ve very little of substance to offer. I #givenothingtoracism.

I #givenothingtoracism. We should call out racist jokes, racist reporting, racist posts—whether they’re coming from people around us, or those in the public eye, such as political leaders. If an organization is doing it, don’t give them your time or business. We might not be as bad as some countries, but it’s not to say that it’s absent—and I want to live in a country where we all get on as Kiwis, regardless of our race. Check out http://givenothing.co.nz (link in bio) where you can make your own video. Join me as well as many other New Zealanders who are giving nothing to racism. 😑 #Wellington #Aotearoa #whanganuiatara #NZ #humanrights #humanrightscommission

A post shared by Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jack.yan) on Jun 14, 2017 at 5:22pm PDT

I have long maintained that Facebook’s databases are dying (hence their need to force people to download malware) and tonight’s discovery is a case of ‘What more proof do you need?’
   Tonight, I can edit a verified (blue-ticked) Facebook page with a fan base in the high five figures that is not mine. I can view all the messages, remove admins, receive notifications, and comment and like as that page. The one thing I cannot do is notify the real owner of that page via Facebook messaging.
   This is not unlike in 2013, when someone found themselves a fan of my public page—but they never liked it. Fortunately for me, they believed us when we said we knew nothing of it.
   And fortunately for this person, I am (a) not dodgy and (b) I know her in real life, though I have not spoken to her in over three years. She hasn’t made me an admin. I’ve looked on the list of pages I really administer and hers isn’t there. I’ve gone into her page’s settings and the page roles, and I’m not listed as an admin. Yet I can do everything an admin can. There’s a box right there for me to add other people as admins to her page. I could kick her off.
   I tried contacting this person’s private profile via Facebook messaging as myself. Impossible. I can’t attach screen shots to show her what I discovered, and clicking ‘Send’ does nothing. I will, of course, email her.
   How did I find out? Someone shared an article from the Lucire Facebook page. I clicked through to see if the sharer had written anything. I wanted to ‘like’ the share as Lucire rather than myself, and discovered that I could only be me and this other person. In fact, I could do nothing in the name of the pages I actually run. The sharer does not have either me or this person as Facebook friends.

The first clue. How come I can comment as this person?

I can only comment as myself as this one other page that I have no current connection to.

Sure enough, I have full access to the site settings and messages.

I’m not an admin, though I seem to have all the admin privileges.

Full access to mess around with her posts, and further proof I can comment as her.

   This blog post is a warning to anyone with a Facebook page. Just know that at any time, access to your page can be granted to someone else.
   If pages are no longer secure, then I have to ask: what is the point of Facebook?
   This isn’t good news for us at all because one of the businesses I am involved in relies on Facebook.
   But it’s certainly a risky platform to be on, and I am willing to bet this bug will become more widespread.

I was very saddened to learn of the passing of my colleague and friend Dave Moore on May 31, which I learned about a few hours after.
   You don’t expect your mates to drop dead at breakfast while on a press trip, especially not at the age of 67, and it’s particularly painful to know he leaves behind a wife and two children.
   The only solace is that he was doing something he loved, in a beautiful part of New Zealand, Wanaka.
   One of my good memories is driving with Dave along south Auckland roads, each of us in a new BMW 650i Cabriolet, during the press launch in 2011. Good manners prevent me from saying what speeds we were doing, but as this is a public blog, let’s say it was 101 km/h on a 100 km/h road. Remember Dave was 61 at this point but he still had the reflexes of a guy half his age.
   Having travelled up this road earlier (this was our return journey), we knew the likelihood of anyone coming the other way was remote. We decided to wind things back down to 50 km/h when we hit the main road and about 200 m down was a police checkpoint!
   We beamed innocently, as though we were doing the legal limit all the time.
   Back at BMW, Dave said to me, ‘That was good, but you could feel a bit of flex in the chassis. Let’s hope they fix that for the M6.’
   Dave was a good bloke. We didn’t always agree but we were always civil about it. On that I have no regrets. He hated mispronunciations (d’Or being pronounced as Dior was his pet peeve) and his politics tended to be further right than mine, but we never let that get in the way of a healthy respect for each other. He was in a good place in his life after quitting the top motoring post at Fairfax New Zealand, and doing his own thing. His daughter was moving up in the foreign service and doing exceptionally well, and he was deeply proud of her. The only photo I have of him is a silly one (he’s on the left and no, I don’t remember why three of us put the napkins on our heads) but usually when you’re on a press junket, you’re not taking photos of your colleagues!
   Dave was still posting on social media right up till his death, remarking how he was enjoying his view at his accommodation in Wanaka.
   There’s something fitting about his Facebook cover photo being his beloved dog, Ruby, walking alone into the distance.
   Our last conversation online was discussing the death of Sir Roger Moore a week before. Dave remembered Ivanhoe and we talked about Robert Brown playing the serf to Roger Moore’s Sir Winifred. Sadly, it wasn’t a car conversation, but it’s not a bad one to end on.
   My condolences to Dave’s family on the passing of a much loved and respected man.

This might make me sound like an old fogey, but doing things the electronic way is only good if that way happens to be more efficient. Not so the AA, which I see has switched to notifying me about my membership renewal via email.
   Here’s what I told them tonight after spending 20 minutes doing it this newfangled way.

Hello there:

I see the AA has sent me an email reminder to renew my membership. Please can you switch back to sending these by post? The electronic experience was terrible.
   1. I never saw the email. It was only checking through the spam folder that I saw it had arrived on the 10th. That was only by chance.
   2. While renewing was simple, the renewal notice that comes electronically does not become a tax invoice when paid—unlike the posted notice.
   3. To get the invoice, I had to go online into the MyAA system.
   4. To get into the MyAA system, I had to sign up again, because my username had expired.
   5. I signed up again but couldn’t have my username because it was taken. No kidding: it was taken by me. Frustrating.
   6. The site isn’t that easy to navigate, sorry. Took ages to find the invoice (‘receipt’). To my surprise, all my old receipts are there, too—so what’s all this about my account having expired? Come to think of it, if it had expired, you’d never have been able to send me any emails over the last few years.
   7. I have to do my own printing, which I’m betting is less eco-friendly than offset printing.
   The old way: the notice would arrive, I would send back a cheque or renew online, bingo.
   If I wasn’t looking through the hundreds of emails in my spam folder—something I do not do regularly—I would never have seen your notice and I would have failed to renew my membership.
   There’s a lot of merit to the old ways, and if it’s not a burden, please continue sending the notices to me via the post—that way [they]’ll arrive.

Kind regards,

Jack

   The expired account BS is something I really tire of. Nvidia did that to me not too long ago, forcing me to sign up again and then saying my own username was taken—despite also saying that I needed to update my drivers. Therefore, (6) above is a very pertinent point, and applies to both organizations. There’s a remarkable lack of logic in claiming an account has expired when you are using the very data from that account to reach that person.
   I find it baffling that companies will lose user data—the Telegraph newspaper springs to mind, as I had signed up there in the 1990s—which makes you wonder just how secure they are.
   At least in the US, the NSA kindly keeps a copy for you …
   It’s not unlike banks telling us that cheques take five to seven days to clear. In 1976, this process was overnight. But if you work for a bank, maybe your computers do work seven times more slowly than the advanced machines Databank had 40 years ago … Sorry, bankers, pull the other one. Some of us actually have functioning memories.

My friend Richard MacManus commemorated the 14th anniversary of ReadWrite, an online publication he founded as a blog (then called ReadWriteWeb) in 2003, by examining blogging and how the open web has suffered with the rise of Facebook and others.
   It’s worth a read, and earlier tonight I fed in the following comment.

I remember those days well, although my progress was probably the opposite of yours, and, in my circles, blogging began very selfishly. Lucire began as a publication, laid out the old-school way with HTML, and one of the first sites in the fashion sector to add a blog was a very crappy one where it was about an ill-informed and somewhat amoral editor’s point of view. For years I refused to blog, preferring to continue publishing an online magazine.
   Come 2002, and we at the Medinge Group [as it then was; we’ve since dropped the definite article] were planning a book called Beyond Branding. One of the thoughts was that we needed one of these newfangled blogs to promote the book, and to add to it for our readers. I was one (the only?) dissenter at the June 2003 meeting, saying that, as far as my contacts were concerned, blogging was for tossers. (Obviously, I didn’t know you back in those days, and didn’t frequent ReadWriteWeb.) [Hugh MacLeod might agree with me though.] By August 2003 it had been set up, and I designed the template for it to match the rest of the book’s artwork. How wrong I was in June. The blog began (and finished, in 2006) with posts in the altruistic, passionate spirit of RWW, and before long (I think it was September 2003), I joined my friends and colleagues.

An excerpt from the Beyond Branding Blog index page.

   In 2006, I went off and did my own blog, and even though there were hundreds of thousands (millions?) of blogs by now, decent bloggers were still few. I say this because within the first few weeks, a major German newspaper was already quoting my blog, and I got my first al-Jazeera English gig as a result of my blogging a few years later. It was the province of the passionate writer, and the good ones still got noticed.
   I still have faith in the blogosphere simply because social media, as you say, have different motives and shared links are fleeting. Want to find a decent post you made on Facebook five years ago? Good luck. Social media might be good for instant gratification—your friends will like stuff you write—but so what? Where are the analysis and the passion? I agree with everything you say here, Richard: the current media aren’t the same, and there’s still a place for long-form blogging. The fact I am commenting (after two others) shows there is. It’s a better place to exchange thoughts, and at least here we’re spared Facebook pushing malware on to people (no, not phishing: Facebook itself).
   Eleven years on, and I’m still blogging at my own space. I even manage a collective blogging site for a friend, called Blogcozy. My Tumblr began in 2007 and it’s still going. We should be going away from the big sites, because there’s one more danger that I should point out.
   Google, Facebook et al are the establishment now, and, as such, they prop up others in the establishment. Google News was once meritorious, now it favours big media names ahead of independents. This dangerously drowns out those independent voices, and credible writers and viewpoints can get lost. The only exception I can think of is The Intercept, which gets noticed on a wide scale.
   Take this argument further and is there still the same encouragement for innovators to give it a go, as we did in the early 2000s, when we realize that our work might never be seen, or if it is to be seen, we need deep pockets to get it seen?
   Maybe we need to encourage people to go away from these walled gardens, to find ways to promote the passionate voices again. Maybe a future search engine—or a current one that sees the light—could have a search specifically for these so we’re not reliant on the same old voices and the same old sites. And I’m sure there are other ways besides. For I see little point in posting on places that lack ‘charisma’, as you put it. They just don’t excite me as much as discovering a blog I really like, and sticking with it. With Facebook’s personal sharing down 25 and 29 per cent in 2015 and 2016 respectively, there is a shift away from uninspiring, privacy-destroying places. Hopefully we can catch them at more compelling and interesting blogs and make them feel at home.

   I have also, belatedly, added Richard’s personal blog to the blogroll on this page.

That’s a nice conclusion. Since my previous blog post, Dr Libby Weaver’s people got back to me within 24 hours. Although no notes from her seminar were available, we decided that I should get a Dr Libby book, which duly arrived. Here ’tis:

Good on @drlibby's team for being so on the ball and keeping their word! They offered to send me a #book in return for posting one of my photos and here it is! Amanda’s read through the chapter headings and it might just be a perfect choice on their part. Thanks, Dr Libby! #Australia #publishing #business #Wellington #Aotearoa #whanganuiatara #NZ

A post shared by Jack Yan 甄爵恩 (@jack.yan) on Apr 19, 2017 at 6:11pm PDT

   Goes to show they were on the ball when the mistake was picked up, a credit was given to me for the photo, and they were prepared to remedy things by posting a book to me. We turned a negative into a positive: a win–win all round. Sometimes all it takes are two parties prepared to be reasonable and find something mutually agreeable. Certain world leaders would be advised to emulate that.

Update: scroll down for a happy ending to this!

Even famous people can slip up. Two posts on Instagram, one of them mine, the other an hour later on Dr Libby Weaver’s account.

   If you’d like a closer inspection, here’s my photo cropped roughly where hers is.

The clouds are the giveaway, and trust me, no one was standing in exactly the same position I was when I took the original.
   I have called Dr Weaver out on Twitter and in a message via her website, with a proposal: how about giving me a set of the notes from the seminar my photo helped her sell, and we’d call this a win–win? Attendees paid NZ$40 to attend her do, and I reckon NZ$40 is a fair price for a photo licence. I hope she’ll bite—seems an amicable way to get round this.

Update: Dr Weaver’s team were really punctual at getting back to me. The following morning, I received a reply from Felicity on her staff, who added my credit on the photograph caption. There were no notes from her seminar, however—note-taking is the attendee’s choice. However, they were happy to send me a book, and I notice this morning (Wednesday, two days after) they have asked for my address. Well done to their team on a swift response, and look out for the book appearing on my Instagram when it arrives. If it’s the sort of thing our readers like, we might even put it on Lucire.
   The lesson: both sides wanted to turn something negative into something positive—wins all round.