I was fascinated to read a New Zealand Herald story on the MÄori asset base, though it wasn’t the financial part that hit me. What was more significant were the principles behind MÄori businesses.
About 15 years ago, when chatting to a woman representing a MÄori winery, I said that she had an amazing opportunity to show that MÄori were far ahead of the game when it came to corporate social responsibility, something that was close to my heart with my work for Medinge Group. Itâs interesting to see that that impression I had in the mid-2000s wasnât wrong, and is now backed up by Dr Maree Roche of Waikato University.
She identifies five values behind MÄori leadership, which blends their needs to support marginalized communities, kaupapa, and contemporary influences.
The values are:
whakaiti (humility): the leader enables others but doesnât take credit themselves;
ko tau rourou and manaakitanga (altruism): ensuring the well-being of others and the generosity of spirit;
whanaungatanga (others): collectivism and relationships with past, present and future generations;
tÄria te wÄ and kaitiakitanga (long-term thinking and guardianship);
tikanga MÄori (cultural authenticity).
Youâll recognize a lot of the same words used in much of Medingeâs work on humanistic branding: the need for serving communities; to consider far more than the immediate quarter (âfinance is brokenâ); and being authentic.
MÄori may find themselves better equipped with their newer organizations to weave in a message about CSR, considering the successful ones already practise it for their own people. Translating that in an export market, for instance, to serving a cause that is of concern to that market, should be comparatively easier than for a company so entrenched in delivering quarterly results to shareholders. Promoting ties between tangata whenua and the export market could be of interest, especially in Asia where many of the same ideas about family, whÄnau and community are shared. They are in an advantageous position and those of us in New Zealand would be foolish to ignore it.
Tumblr is dead, long live NewTumbl.
I came across NewTumbl (formally newTumbl) a few days ago, after finding my Tumblr feed just wasnât what it used to be. Itâs not that the dirty pictures are goneâI only ever followed one blog where the images might be considered sensualâbut that the energy was. Those friends whose posts interested me werenât posting much any more, and it wasnât just them: my posting had diminished significantly. Platforms, I imagine, have a shelf life, and when announcements such as Verizonâs last year, which became known, perhaps incorrectly, as Tumblrâs âporn banâ, it was bound to affect the platform. It was the language that opened Verizon up to ridicule: apparently, they had a problem with âfemale-presenting nipplesâ, and some innocent content was flagged for removal.
What Verizon had really underestimated was that among the adult imagery were communities that were having free and safe discussions about sexuality, and sex workers themselves had a place where they, too, could post. It wasnât an âadultâ site per se, considering the overwhelming majority of the content was family-friendly. That perhaps kept the place relatively safe: you could have these private discussions while coming across general posts featuring interesting photography or good political viewpoints. Tumblr also hadnât descended into the political divisiveness that plague platforms such as Twitter.
I liked Tumblr for many reasons. It became a fun place to post interesting graphics for me, and to put anything that I didnât want to structure into long-form thoughts. It was image-based. Every now and then I would put up a quotation. The Font Police blog is still there, with over 20,000 followers.
I liked the fact that for years, someone would get back to you when you posted a query. This was true even after Yahoo acquired it.
But during the Blogcozy experiment, which sadly resulted in that platformâs closure, I cut down my time on Tumblr, because I had found a more suitable place to put those brief thoughts and to share with friends. Had Tumblr been a greater draw, I wouldnât have considered it. After Blogcozy closed, I didnât really resume my Tumblring to the same extent. Social seemed to be dying, since it was being run by Big Tech firms that lied as their main position. Even if Tumblr was more honest (and it was), the age of social media seemed to be at an end.
I may have been wrong, because since posting on NewTumbl Iâve been impressed by the sense of energy there. Yes, it has attracted a great deal of the adult posters who left Tumblr. But if you donât want to see X-rated stuff, you say so in the settings, and adjust to M (for mature), O (for office), or even F (for family). You won’t see anything coarser than what you chose (with the occasional exception when posters did not have a clue how the ratings’ system works). The interface is familiar-but-different-enough for Tumblr users and Verizon lawyers. Yet it goes beyond what Tumblr does, with the smart use of Interstate as the body typeface, and photos in multi-image posts actually appear in the order you load them.
Itâs not perfect: I couldnât link a video but I could upload; and I managed to stumble on a 404 page by following links, both of which Iâll report, since they make it so easy to do.
But hereâs the really good thing: the transparency. One of the main developers, Dean, talks to users and provides feedback. Heâll even post when an error occurs during developmentâthatâs something youâll never see Facebook do when its databases die.
He and I have already exchanged notes via DMs after I joined for two days, and I said I saw so many parallels between what he was doing and what I saw with Tesla when Martin Eberhard was running it (transparency over ego), or even in the days when Jerry and David were building YahooâIâm old enough to have been submitting sites to them while they were still being run out of a garage. Thereâs an exciting sense with Dean and the small NewTumbl crew that theyâre building something useful for the world, celebrating free speech and humanity. Am I being overly optimistic? I donât think I am: I enjoy the UI, I like the openness and honesty, and these are just what the tech sector needs. I see a draw for spending my time here even though I have zero followers to my blog. The buzz feels similar to when I discovered some sites back in the 1990s: it seems new and exciting.
Itâs also rather nice being the first person to populate some fandom hashtags, though I was second for Doctor Who, and for anyone ever searching for The Avengers, they will see, rightly, a photograph of Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee.
Iâll see you there at jackyan.newtumbl.com. Lucire also has a NewTumbl at lucire.newtumbl.com.
Above: The one thing I posted to Tumblr that went viral, in 2011.
As Iâve often said, itâs wise to keep an eye on your Facebook ad preferencesâ page. Even if youâve opted out of Facebook targeting, Facebook will still keep compiling information on you. I see no other purpose for this other than to target you with advertising, contrary to what you expect.
Facebook also tells you which companies have uploaded their marketing lists to them, and this has been very interesting reading. A load of US politicians whom I have never heard of somehow have this information, and todayâs crop is no different.
Iâve written to Old Mout Cider, which I was surprised to find is part of the Dutch conglomerate Heineken NV, and await an answer, but the biggie here has to be Ăber.
Many years ago, I tried the app but could never get it to work. Neither could my partner. Then we started hearing from Susan Fowler and Pando Daily, and that helped confirm that we would never support the company.
Basically, Ăber would never let me log in, saying I had exhausted my password attempts after the grand total of one, despite sending a password reset link. My partner could log in but we could never figure anything out beyond that (it had credit card details she had never entered and said we lived next door).
Concerned about this, I went to Ăberâs website to request deletion of my personal details, but this was the screen I got.
Now, either Big Tech One is lying or Big Tech Two is lying.
To its credit, Ăber New Zealand responded very quickly on Twitter (on Good Friday, no less) and said it would look into it. Within minutes it was able to confirm that I do not have an account there (presumably it was deleted with a lack of use, or maybe I went and did it back when they wouldnât let me log in?) and my email address doesnât appear anywhere.
Therefore, we can likely again conclude that Facebook lies and we have to bring into question its advertising preferencesâ management page.
We already know Facebook has lied to advertisers about the number of people it can reach (namely that it exceeds the number of people alive in certain demographics), that there is a discrepancy between what it reports in the preferences and what a full download of personal data reveals, so I have to wonder what the deception is here.
Is it allowing these advertisers to reach us even when (as Ăber claims) they have no information on us? (Heinekenâs response will seal the deal when they get back to me after Easter.) In that case, it will be very hard for Facebook to argue that we have given them consent to do this.
Heineken, incidentally, is a major advertiser on Instagram, as I see their advertisements even after opting out of all alcohol advertising on the Facebook ad preferencesâ page (as instructed by Instagram). When we establish contact next week, I will be more than happy to tell them this. Who knows? While I doubt they will cease advertising on the platforms on my say-so, sometimes you have to plant the seed so that they are aware their ads are not being filtered out from those people who do not want to see booze promoted in their feeds.
As someone who read Confucius as a young man, and was largely raised on his ideas, free speech with self-regulation is my default positionâthough when it becomes apparent that people simply arenât civilized enough to use it, then you have to consider other solutions.
We have Facebook making statements saying they are âStanding Against Hateâ, yet when friends report white nationalist and separatist groups, they are told that nothing will be done because it is âcounter-speechâ. We know that Facebook has told the Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards, that it has done absolutely nothing despite its statements. This is the same company that shut off its âView asâ feature (which allowed people to check how their walls would look from someone elseâs point-of-view) after share price-affecting bad press, yet when it comes to actual humans getting killed and their murders streamed live via their platform, Facebook, through its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, essentially tells us, âThere are no problems, nothing to see here.â
Weâre just a platform
We take no responsibility at all for what gets shared through us. You can say what you like, but we think we can weather this storm, just as we weathered the last one, and just as weâll weather the next.
Kiwi lives donât matter
White nationalist groups make for great sharing. And sharing is caring. So we wonât shut them down as we did with Muslim groups. The engagement is just too good, especially when weâre only going to upset fewer than five million New Zealanders.
Hate is great
Hate gets shared and people spend more time on Facebook as a result. Whether it’s about New Zealanders or the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, we’ll be there to help distribute it. Genocide’s fine when it doesn’t affect our share price.
Facebook users are âdumb fucksâ
Our founder said it, and this is still our ongoing policy at Facebook. Weâll continue to lie because we know youâre addicted to our platform. And no matter which country summons our founder, we know you wonât have the guts to issue a warrant of arrest.
Actions speak more loudly than words, and in Facebookâs case, their words are a form of Newspeak, where they mean the opposite to what everyone else understands.
#Facebook: we had better turn off the âView asâ function, it could be open to abuse.
Also Facebook: live-streaming is fine, nothing to see here.#Facebooklies
RTL Above: From the first episode after the half-season break, ‘Endstation’. All three men have, at some point, played the sidekick on Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei: ErdoÄan Atalay, who was hired to play second banana in the third episode but has since become the star of the show; Rainer Strecker, the man whom Atalay replaced, here guesting and playing another role altogether; and Daniel Roesner, who is currently Atalay’s co-star in the series, and who also had played another role prior to this one.
One for the Alarm fĂŒr Cobra 11: die Autobahnpolizei fans. Our groupâthe largest on Facebook and, ironically, the one run mostly by non-Germansâsaw this question from Tim Gottschall:
Kann mir mal bitte jemand erklÀren warum es bei Cobra 11 schon 42 DVD Staffeln gibt aber jetzt im TV die 33 Staffel lÀuft? Also damit auch die neuen Folgen
This has always annoyed me. At Action Concept, this is still season 23.
This has been compounded by certain episodes from new seasons being mixed in as the existing season was airing (e.g. production seasons 6 to 12) and episodes being shown out of order.
According to production blocks (with overlaps explained above):
Season 1: episodes aired between March 12 and April 30, 1996 (episodes 1â9)
Season 2: March 11, 1997 to June 4, 1998 (episodes 10â31)
Season 3: October 1, 1998 to May 6, 1999 (episodes 32â47)
Season 4: December 16, 1999 to December 14, 2000 (episodes 48â63)
Season 5: April 5, 2001 to April 11, 2002 (episodes 64â80)
Season 6: April 18, 2002 to April 10, 2003 (episodes 81â97)
Season 7: September 11, 2003 to April 29, 2004 (episodes 98â110)
Season 8: March 25 to November 18, 2004 (episodes 111â25)
Season 9: February 10, 2005 to April 20, 2006 (episodes 126â41)
Season 10: April 27 to November 16, 2006 (episodes 142â57)
Season 11: March 22 to November 1, 2007 (episodes 158â68)
Season 12: September 20, 2007 to April 24, 2008 (episodes 169â79)
Season 13: September 4, 2008 to April 9, 2009 (episodes 180â94)
Season 14: September 3, 2009 to April 22, 2010 (episodes 195â209)
Season 15: September 2, 2010 to April 14, 2011 (episodes 210â22)
Season 16: September 15, 2011 to April 19, 2012 (episodes 223â38)
Season 17: September 6, 2012 to April 18, 2013 (episodes 239â53)
Season 18: October 24, 2013 to May 15, 2014 (episodes 254â67)
Season 19: October 9, 2014 to April 30, 2015 (episodes 268â82)
Season 20: September 10, 2015 to May 26, 2016 (episodes 283â98)
Season 21: September 1, 2016 to May 18, 2017 (episodes 299â317)
Season 22: September 14, 2017 to May 3, 2018 (episodes 318â36)
Season 23: September 13, 2018 to date (episode 337 to date)
However, according to how Cobra 11 aired, all but the (short) first block were shown with a break in betweenâpresumably due to labour laws there that required casts to have a break otherwise they would be overworked. So if you divide each of the seasons above into two, except for the first, then we are up to âseason 43â. This is the numbering the DVDs use. As to âseason 33â, I understand RTL used to follow the production numbering, but eventually diverged from it, so itâs a mixture of the âstudioâ numbering and the âbroken seasonâ numbering.
I realize no one outside the fan community for this show will really care, but as this is my personal and business blog, a wide variety of subjects is covered. And for those fans who may stumble across this, I hope the above helps settle some questions.
I never planned to spend quite this much on computers in the first two months of the year. The laptop was in dire need of an upgrade, so I had budgeted for it. After getting it, I was impressed, but thought that the desktop PC, which dates from 2012 and upgraded with a Crucial 525 Gbyte SSD just over two years ago, was holding its own. The processor might have been slow, but then, Iâm a middle-aged man with reflexes slower than that of a 20-year-old, so I hardly noticed. I thought, best-case scenario, Iâd look at an upgrade at the end of 2019.
Last Wednesday, the PC wouldnât start properly. I was incredibly lucky as I had backed up all pertinent directories the night before, and only lost a bunch of frequently used scans (which can be re-created) and some text files where I wrote down some drafts. In the grand scheme, this was the least amount of data I had ever lost, and Iâm very old-school: I still download emails with a client and burn mailbox archives on to DVD.
The original diagnosis was a faulty SSD, where the operating system lived. The computer kept booting on to the secondary hard drive, which I used prior to the SSD. The hard drive was cloned in 2016 and became a storage drive, but I never deleted the old OS from it. The plan: get a new SSD and clone it again.
I took the computer to Atech, where I was a regular visitor anyway. I had even discussed the possibility of buying a PC from them. The boss, Kidd Liang, began cloning the hard drive on to a fresh Samsung SSD, which he believed would be more reliable than the Crucial. But after attempting the process twice, he said there were too many bad sectors on the hard drive for the cloning to be successful. Based on the noise, he deduced something else would bite the dust: either the power supply or the graphicsâ card. Nevertheless, he plugged the SSD into the PCâand it was at this point the power supply failed.
Iâve seen multiple faults like this beforeâI had one machine in the 2000s die with a motherboard failure, then a CPU one, within 24 hours. Kidd said I was incredibly lucky as someone who had done a major back-up, because I then faced the very real prospect of needing a new desktop PC. I was able to continue working on Wednesday night thanks to my laptop, and when it was plugged in to my big monitor, I finally noticed the speed difference of a modern machine versus my old one. And I liked it.
Therefore, it was with some excitement I collected my desktop PC from Atech on Saturday morning. I didnât want to go overboard but at the same time needed to do some future-proofing. Kidd calls it the âvintage gaming seriesâ, as he reused my old Cooler Master case and DVD-ROM drive, along with the top fan, but everything else was replaced. It’s like one of those Singer Porsches: old on the outside, new on the inside. My existing Windows licence worked on the new machine. Inside was the Samsung along with a new 2 Tbyte hard drive; the 1 Tbyte I had was also installed, even if it has bad sectors. Itâll be the back-up of the back-up.
Going with a six-core Ryzen 5 2600 isnât as impressive as the laptopâs i7-8750H, but once the programs are running I donât notice much difference (middle age again). Thereâs an Aorus X470 motherboard, 16 Gbyte of RAM, and instead of going with Geforce, I decided to see how a Sapphire Nitro Plus Radeon RX 580 with 8 Gbyte on the video would be like.
While everything is more stable and faster, I donât get a sense of a major leap, probably because of the 2016 SSD upgrade. Nevertheless, itâs given me a fresh start for 2019, with some old software (e.g. Gammadyne Mailer) not having made it on to the new machine. More time-consuming was getting the fonts right: Windows 10 now selects a user directory for some of your fonts and these do not appear in the registry (the trick is to change the permissions of the fontsâ folder, and make sure the fonts are installed for all users). And, once again, the reliability index has gone from 10 to 1 because Windows seems to be allergic to either software or usage. Thereâs still the odd program that needs to be installed, but as the weekend draws to a close, weâre almost there. The coming weekâs going to be a busy one and itâs nice facing it with new tech.
I have to give Atech public praise, too. When I bought this computerâs predecessor at PB, you could still do a deal with the local manager, and you had the sense you werenât just a number. Drew and Mark really looked after me. PB has deservedly grown because of its keen pricing and marketing, but as it has done so, you now get the feeling that itâs no longer the friendly, small retailer that it once was, with all of the promo coordinated in Auckland. Kidd at Atech on Cuba Street brings me back to that one-on-one feel: you could talk to the boss and do a deal. Matt, who usually served me at Atech since the Wakefield Street days, did the same. You arenât just a number here, and it was a pleasure to be able to chat through my exact requirements and have a rig built to my specifications and (meagre, post-laptop-buying) budget.
On this Pope Gregory Arbitrary Calendar Start Day, I wrote to a contact of mine at Renault New Zealand.
In mid-2018, I joked that, since Renault had no dealers in Wellington (never mind what’s listed on their websiteâthe only people who can see a dealer there are psychic mediums), I could sell them out of my house.
Today, I may well have gone some way toward doing that, as someone I know would like a test drive of a first-gen Captur after I put it into her consideration set. After all, I put my money where my mouth is with Renault, so when I recommend one, I do so with some authority.
In the same note, I detailed some observations about Renault New Zealand’s marketing. I have since forwarded it to their top man in the country.
I concluded all that with, ‘And I reckon Hiroto Saikawa is dodgy and he was trying to cover up his own incompetence by framing his old boss and mentor. But that’s another story.’
Even if I sold one car, I might become the city’s top Renault seller. ‘If you find a better car, buy it.’
Avira informs me that Ccleaner 5.51 is infected with a virus, called TR/Swrort.ofrgv.
I havenât come across anything online about this threat, except for reports in 2017 when Ccleaner was distributed with malware, eventually found to be the work of hackers who compromised the servers of the company behind Ccleaner. The Hacker News said that hackers got in there five months before replacing the legitimate Ccleaner with their own.
Iâve no idea where the blame should go this time, or even if my own computer has been compromised somewhere, but I’ve now downgraded to v. 5.50 and there have been no further alerts.
Anyone else had trouble with their Ccleaners?
Megan McArdleâs excellent opâed in The Washington Post, âA farewell to free journalismâ, has been bookmarked on my phone for months. Itâs a very good summary of where things are for digital media, and how the advent of Google and Facebook along with the democratization of the internet have reduced online advertising income to a pittance. Thereâs native advertising, of course, which Lucire and Lucire Men indulged in for a few years in the 2010s, and I remain a fan of it in terms of what it paid, but McArdleâs piece is a stark reminder of the real world: there ainât enough of it to keep every newsroom funded.
Iâll also say that I have been very tempted over the last year or two to start locking away some of Lucireâs 21 years of content behind a paywall, but part of me has a romantic notion (and you can see it in McArdleâs own writing) that information deserves to be free.
Everyone should get a slice of the pie if they are putting up free content along with slots for Doubleclick ads, for instance, and those advertising networks operate on merit: get enough qualified visitors (and they do know who they are, since very few people opt out; in Facebookâs case opting out actually does nothing and they continue to track your preferences) and theyâll feed the ads through accordingly, whether you own a ârealâ publication or not.
It wasnât that long ago, however, when more premium ad networks worked with premium media, leaving Googleâs Adsense to operate among amateurs. It felt like a two-tier ad market. Those days are long gone, since plenty of people were quite happy to pay the cheap rates for the latter.
Itâs why my loyal Desktop readers who took in my typography column every month between 1996 and 2010 do not see me there any more: we columnists were let go when the business model changed.
All of this can exacerbate an already tricky situation, as the worse funded independent media get, the less likely we can afford to offer decent journalism, biasing the playing field in favour of corporate media that have deeper pockets. Google, as we have seen, no longer ranks media on merit, either: since they and Facebook control half of all online advertising revenue, and over 60 per cent in the US, itâs not in their interests to send readers to the most meritorious. Itâs in their interests to send readers to the media with the deeper pockets and scalable servers that can handle large amounts of traffic with a lot of Google ads, so they make more money.
Itâs yet another reason to look at alternatives to Google if you wish to seek out decent independent media and support non-corporate voices. However, even my favoured search engine, Duck Duck Go, doesnât have a specific news service, though itâs still a start.
In our case, if we didnât have a print edition as well as a web one, then online-only mightnât be worthwhile sans paywall.
Tonight I was interested to see The Guardian Weekly in magazine format, a switch that happened on October 10.
Itâs a move that I predicted over a decade ago, when I said that magazines should occupy a âsoft-cover coffee-table bookâ niche (which is what the local edition of Lucire aims to do) and traditional newspapers could take the area occupied by the likes of Time and Newsweek.
With the improvement in printing presses and the price of lightweight gloss paper it seemed a logical move. Add to changing reader habitsâthe same ones that drove the death of the broadsheet format in the UKâand the evolution of editorial and graphic design, I couldnât see it heading any other way. Consequently, I think The Guardian will do rather well.
A rebrand should be done with consultation, and that should be factored in to any decision-making. In the 2010s, it should consider out-of-the-box suggestions, especially in an increasingly cluttered market-place. It should be launched internally first, then externally. A new logo would surface after months of exhaustive design work. The result should be something distinctive and meaningful that resonates with all audiences.
Meanwhile, hereâs one done by my Alma Mater amongst false claims, poor analyses, and considerable opposition, with the resulting logo appearing a mere week after the powers-that-be voted to ignore the feedback. In branding circles, any professional will tell you that there’s no way a logo can appear that quicklyâunless, of course, Victoria University of Wellington had no inclination to listen to any of its audiences during its “feedback” process. But then, maybe this was done in a hurry:
The result is flawed and lacks quality. Without even getting into the symbol or the typography, the hurried nature of this design is evident with the margin: the text is neither optically nor mathematically aligned, and accurately reflects the lack of consideration that this rebrand has followed. The one symbol I like, the ceremonial crest, does away with the type, and judging from the above, it’s just as well.
I like change, and my businesses have thrived on it. But this left much to be desired from the moment we got wind of it. It supplants a name sourced from Queen Victoria with the name of an even older, white, male historical figure, creates confusion with at least three universities that share its initials if it is to be abbreviated UoW (Woollongong, Wah, Winchester; meanwhile the University of Washington is UW), and offers little by way of differentiation.
Yes, there are other Victoria Universities out there. To me thatâs a case of sticking with the name and marketing it more cleverly to be the dominant oneâand forcing others to retrench. Where did the Kiwi desire to be number one go? Actually, how bad was the confusion, as, on the evidence, Iâm unconvinced.
If itâs about attracting foreign students, then alumnus Callum Osborneâs suggestion of Victoria University of New Zealand is one example to trade on the nation brand, which rates highly.
There were many ways this could have gone, and at each turn amateurism and defeatism appeared, at least to my eyes, to be the themes. #UnWell
