Weāre probably far enough along from the event for people not to know which one I am referring to, as Iāve no wish to embarrass the organizers.
Earlier in 2021, we saw a weekend event that would take place at the āJohnsonville Community Hubā. No address was given other than that. Both Duck Duck Go and Google seemed to think this meant Waitohi, the new library and swimming pool complex.
We arrived there to find that no one knew of this event, but maybe we could try the community hall next door?
No joy.
There was the Collective Community Hub on Johnsonville Road but their website made it clear that it wasnāt open at the weekend.
We hung round Johnsonville for a bit and decided we would check out the Collective place, just to see it up close.
Sure enough, thatās where the event wasāit was open at the weekendāand we got there after everyone had packed up.
They were very apologetic and we told them the above. They had noted, however, that there had been more information on Facebook.
To me, thatās a big mistake, because I donāt know what their Facebook page is, and even if I did, there was no guarantee I would see it for a variety of reasons. (Try loading any fan page on Facebook on mobile: the posts take unbearably long and few people would have the patience.) A search for the event on both Duck Duck Go and Google never showed a Facebook page, either.
A similar event posted its cancellation on Facebook exclusively, something which we didnāt know till we got there, and after getting puzzled looks from the party that had booked the venue, I randomly found one organizerās page and clicked on his Facebook link. Again, nothing about the event itself came up on Duck Duck Go or on Google.
In the latter case, the organizer had the skills to make a web page, a normal one, so was it so hard to put the cancellation there?
You just canāt find things on Facebook. They donāt appear to be indexed. And if they are, theyāre probably so far down the resultsā pages that they wonāt be seen. If youāre organizing an event, by all means, post there to those who use Facebook keenly (a much smaller number than you think, with engagement decreasing year after year), but it is no substitute for getting it into properly indexed event calendars or on to the web, where regular people will put in search terms and look for it.
Facebook is not the internet. Thank God.
My Meizu M6 Note has had to be retired, due to an expanding battery, something which I probably shouldnāt have tolerated for so long (it began happening months ago). I only made the call to stop using it last week after the volume buttons could no longer function, and I probably should have stopped earlier still* as it would have been easier to get the SIM and micro SD cards out!
My original plan was to go slightly newer and opt for a Note 9, and I had located a vendor on Aliexpress who was prepared to send it to me with the Chinese Flyme OS installed. But my sense is that Meizu is now past its prime, and everything seems to be shutting down.
I had been logging into the app store daily for over a year to earn points, but Meizu informed us that it would cease to record log-ins, and we had to redeem what we could by January. Its now-useless default music app Iāve already blogged about. No one answers international queries any more and from what I can tell, official Meizu reps seldom frequent the Chinese forumsāwhile the international forums consist of frustrated users talking among themselves.
And this is coming from a self-confessed Meizu fan. I chose the M2 Note back in 2015ā16 and if it werenāt for the damaged screen, I might never have bought the M6 Note. For now, Iām back to using the M2, which is slower, and the battery doesnāt hold its charge quite as well any more, but at least everything from the M6 Note has synced to it. With my app usage lower than it was in 2012, I donāt notice any real lags in performance within the programs I do use, something that I couldnāt say even two years ago when I was still popping into Instagram daily. Only the camera gets annoying with its slowness. I have gone away from the Swype keyboard though, as Swype no longer sends verification codes to your email to sync your custom word dictionary. Iām muddling my way through Microsoftās Swiftkey, which has proved a tolerable successor (the chief gains are the ability to access en and em dashes and ellipses from the keyboard without switching languages). It seems to forget that youāve pressed shift in order to write a proper noun (you have to do this twice for it to stick!) but it is learning words like Lucire and Autocade as well as my email address.
Readers may recall that after I had the M2 Noteās screen repaired, it would no longer charge, except at the store in Johnsonville (Repair Plus) that fixed it! The lads there would never tell me why they could charge it and I couldnāt and just grinned, while I told them how patently ridiculous the situation was, that even a new charging cable could not work; in fact none of my chargers did. They didnāt seem to care that this was the predicament they put me in. The issueāand I donāt know if they are to blameāis that the charging port is looser than it was, and it needs a very decent micro USB connector. That was thanks to PB Tech for telling me the truthāand a thumbs-down to Repair Plus for not even trying to sell me a better cable! Moral of the story: use people for the one thing that can do, but donāt expect much more from them, not even basic after-sales service.
With its āfaultā remedied about a year and a half ago, I had a phone to use once I put the micro SD and SIM cards back in, though Amanda isnāt able to hear me that clearly on it when Iām at the office, and Iām sure Iāve missed calls and SMSs probably due to limits with the frequencies it uses (though I had checked six years ago it would handle the Vodafone 3G and 4G frequencies).
So a new phone is needed because the “phone” function of the M2 isn’t up to par. I donāt need the latest and greatest, and thanks to the pace of development, a phone launched in 2020 is already obsolete in China. It seems that if Meizu is on the way down that I should go to its arch-rival, Xiaomi, and get the Note 9ās competitor, which roughly has the same name: the Redmi Note 9.
The Xiaomi names are all confusing and the Indian market has different phones with the same names, to add to the confusion already out there. I donāt profess to know where the S, T, Note, Pro, and the rest fit, but letās just say Iāve been led to get a Redmi Note 9.
PB had first dibs but as the salesā rep could not tell me whether I could easily put the Chinese version of MIUI on it, in order to rid myself of the Google bloatware, then I couldnāt safely buy one. I wasted enough time on the M6 Note on that front, and my installation of its Chinese OS could well have been down to a fluke. He also refused to tell me the price difference between the sale units and the shop-soiled demo ones other than it was small, and, āYou may as well buy a new one.ā
Thereās no irony here with privacy: Chinese apps at least tell you what legislation covers their usage, unlike western apps which donāt mention US Government snooping yet Google passes on stuff anyway. In all the years Iāve used the Meizus there has been nothing dodgy in terms of the data received and sent, as far as I know, and thereās nothing questionable constantly running such as Google Services that transmits and drains your battery.
There are some great sites, a number of which are in India, that teach you how to turn off some of Xiaomiās bloatwareās notifications, but they seldom annoyed me on the Meizu. Iāll soon find out first-hand how good they are.
Why the Redmi Note 9? It was one of the few on Aliexpress that I could find with the Chinese ROM installed, saving me a lot of effort. I wonāt have to root it, for a start. When your choice is down to about half a dozen phonesāAliexpress and Ebay vendors are so keen to get export sales they make it a point not to sell Chineseāyouāre guided on price and your daily usage. Iām a firm believer that a phone should not cost the same as a used car. Bonuses: the big battery and the fact it isnāt too bright (thatās just me); detriments: 199 g in weight and a humongous screen.
The vendor (YouGeek) was conscientious enough to send me a message (along the lines of āAre you absolutely sure you want the Chinese version?ā) which cost me a couple of days since I donāt always pop back to the site (and you canāt read messages on the phone browser version anyway). Now weāre on the same page, theyāve dispatched the phone. Weāll see how things look in a couple of weeks. Thereās no turning back now.
* PS.:From How to Geek: ‘Once you notice the battery is swollen or compromised in any way, you should immediately stop using the device. Turn the power off, and above all else, do not charge the device. Once the battery has reached such a point of failure that the battery is swollen, you must assume that all safety mechanisms in the battery are offline. Charging a swollen battery is literally asking for it to turn into an exploding ball of noxious flammable gas right in your living room.’ I wish I was told this when I first went to PB months ago when the battery began expanding and I enquired about phones.
Amazing what sort of press releases come in. I had no idea that Auckland is our capital, and I was surprised to find that Toronto and Antwerp are as well in the same release.
Essential Living is a British firm, from the looks of it, and no, we won’t be publishing this in Lucire.
You’d think the PR firm might check as well, but maybe post-Brexit they don’t really care about other countries any more?
Meanwhile, on Twitter. It’s getting nutty toward the end of the year. Just today we saw a motorcyclist come off his Suzuki in Johnsonville, and a Toyota van almost losing control altogether in Tawa. ‘Driving to the conditions’ doesn’t seem to be a thing any more. On Friday, it was this:
Have the rules for traffic lights changed? I stopped on a red at Karo Drive, Mercedes in the next lane went right through, truck driver behind me was beeping like crazy wanting me to go. Clearly Iām in the minority believing that red means stop.
The truck driver overtakes me, then stops on a red. So I beeped him, because I figured that red now means go. And he gets really upset, starts backing his Park Contractors Ltd. of Wainuiomata truck into me (he doesnāt hit). The snowflake canāt handle what he dished out.
Could Park Contractors Ltd. of Wainuiomata please send me the updated traffic light rules? It seems red sometimes means go but it also sometimes means stop and as an immigrant I do not know how the locals distinguish between the two types of red.
Taking some of the themes today on RNZās The Panel with Wallace Chapman (pre-Panelhere, part one of the show here, and part two here), I offer a bit more commentary. Todayās topics: the COVID-19 mandate for schools; quitting drinking; Finland planning to let people see othersā salaries; the level of spending above New Zealand Superannuation; Countdownās toy gifts; and the multi-modal commuter.
Big thanks to Amelia, Wallace and Julia today for a very enjoyable hour and 15 minutes!
Please note that this podcast is not affiliated with Radio New Zealandāthis has been done of my own volition and from my own inspiration.
I was thinking earlier tonight how cars were the one thing that helped me navigate Aotearoa when I got here with my parents. I might not have understood the culture immediately, and very little outside the faces of my family was familiar to me. But I saw Toyota Corollas (the E20s) and Honda Civics outside. And BMC ADO16s. These at least were an external source of familiarity, since they were commonplace in Hong Kong. A neighbour had a four-door Civic back in Homantin, the first car whose steering wheel I ever sat behind as a child.
The cars here in New Zealand were much older generally, since there was more of a DIY fix-it culture, and Hong Kong prospered later, resulting in a newer fleet. Those early days were like a history lesson on what had gone before in the 1950s and 1960s, filling in the gaps. But my eyes still went to those newer 1970s shapes. Curves? Who wants curves when you can have boxy shapes and those groovy vinyl roofs?!
I didnāt say I had taste at age four.
What a real honour to promote my reo! Thank you, Dr Grace Gassin and Te Papa for spearheading the Chinese Languages in Aotearoa project and for this incredible third instalment, where I get to speak and promote Cantonese!
Obviously I couldnāt say anything earlier, especially during Chinese Language Week, but I am extremely grateful the very distinct Chinese languages are being given their due with this project!
My participation began with Grace and I having a kÅrero last year, and how Chinese Language Week was not inclusive. The organizers of that make the mistake of equating Chinese with Mandarin, and claim that Cantonese and other tongues are dialects, which is largely like saying Gaelic is a dialect of English.
Do read more at the Te Papa blog as Grace goes into far more depth, and brings everything into the context of the history of Aotearoa.
A decade separates these two incarnations of Lucireās shopping home page. Some Facebook gadgets were added during the 2010s and the magazine cover was updated, but it was woefully out of date and needed to be refreshed.
Itās very unusual for us to go into the less-frequented pages in Lucire and adapt them to a new template before doing a major one such as the fashion index page. But sometimes you go with the creative flow, so it was the turn of the āNewsstandā pages plus the shopping home page, which hadnāt been updated in seven years (and most of it hadn’t been touched for ten).
Needless to say, on the latter, almost everything was out of date. Weāve removed the links to the shopping directory, which last existed to support the print magazine as it was in the mid-2000s. Since then, we havenāt really had a shopping section in print, and we ceased to update it much online.
What was disappointing to note, after my lament about the disappearance of so many fashion websites earlier this year, that even more had closed down, so much so that the three āNewsstandā pages have come back down to two (as it was in the 2000s). There are still some that have not been updated in years, but we have maintained the links for historical purposes.
Poking about the directories did lead me to lucire.com/xp, a framed page with content for our mobile edition in 2000 that was compatible with Plucker. Long before cellphones became the norm, we were already catering for portable devices. I knew we had a Plucker edition, but had forgotten about the xp directory till tonight.
The copy on that page reads, āLucire Express was the hand-held version of Lucire, powered by Plucker. With more recent developments in syndication and content management, support for Express has been discontinued.ā
It seemed logical that cellphone browsers would be developed to reduce the content of high-res pages to make them readable, but that is yet to happen (unless one goes into a simplified view mode). To think that programmers found a way to do that in the 2000s. How times have changed, with what appears to be a slowing down of innovationāforcing us to adapt to the technology (developing mobile-friendly themes in-house) rather than the other way round.
Lucireās online edition home page: out with the old (top), in with the new (above).
I switched over Lucireās home page to the new template today. Iām going to miss the old one, since it had the effect of a bled page, something thatās de rigueur for a fashion magazine.
As outlined in my previous post, itās just something we had to do to move with the times, and to make life easier for those browsing on mobile devices. I recognize the irony here, as someone who doesnāt tend to use cellphones having to design for that very medium, but then Iām also a realist.
Once I get a bit more confidence hacking the theme from HTML Codex, the bled effect might return.
I made some calls on what to include this time round. The social links are goneārecent events have just made them too discouraging. (The Facebook ones disappeared years ago.) The top image has been replaced by a slider with three images. The little graphic featuring the latest issue of Lucire has also been removed, only because we couldnāt figure out where it would go in the new template, but it might make a return sooner rather than later. In terms of appearance, there are fewer lines, though this is more down to convenience and working with someone elseās CSS; again, they might make a return at some point. The dotted line separating the footer from the body has also gone for now.
As every web publisher knows, no template is set in stone and thereās ongoing evolution.
Itās partly a shame to bring to an impending close a template entirely programmed by me. Since Lucire started, it was built on my code, the first issue done on Notepad. But HTML Codex has done a good job with its stylesheet, it would be foolish to reinvent the wheel. Many of the old pages with my code will still exist (since, other than one article, we donāt redo old HTML pages), and itāll take months before we shift all section indices and the news pages over. I am looking forward to the changes, and thatās always a good sign.
