Demolition has commenced on 1â4 Māmari Street, across the road from where I lived for over three decades.
Iâm not against change and my feelings toward the development have already been recorded here.
It was with a tinge of sadness that I saw the demolition crews there and the only wall left standing was part of the north side to no. 4.
Right now the sections, littered with debris, is letting in plenty of summer sunlight.
But not for long.
Iâll remember Gus and Lyna Bourkeâs place at no. 2 which I understand they bought after the war. Lyna was widowed by the time we met her in 1983, and she had an incredibly low-mileage silver Hillman Hunter in the garage. As her eyesight failed, the car stayed in there, and it was in incredibly good nick by the time she passed in the 1990s. We always had good chats and Lyna was our âneighbourhood watchâ as she kept an eye on the street from her living room.
Frank and Carol Reading and their family at no. 3 were probably there for a decent half-century, and they were incredibly good neighbours. Frank passed only a few years ago but they had wisely bought the Bourke residence as well in the 1990s, plus no. 4 decades before, so I imagine that made life easy for the developers who only had to purchase from two sellers to build on the site.
We visited the Reading house many times over the years to help each other out, and that was the great community we had in the cul-de-sac back then. On our side of the street there were frequent chats over the fences with nos. 12 and 14.
The old street changed a lot when both nos. 10 and 11 went on the market in 2018, then it was our turn in 2019. And now it has had its biggest change in probably a century as those old weatherboard bungalows from the early 20th century were demolished.
I realize same-again McHouses arenât everyoneâs cup of tea but as one famous architect recently told me: itâs hard to get creativity consented. And the demand is there, so this was inevitable. I already felt that the old street was a memory, but one that could be refreshed on a revisit; but now it really is a memory. Contrast this with the other neighbourhoods Iâve lived in Wellington, which have remained largely the same, or were subject to far slower developments after our departure.
Just as well I got the neighbours together in 2011 to stop the council taking away the right turn into the street. With 24 dwellings there in the near future, theyâre going to need it more than ever.
And yes, the above video was on Instagram, which is going the way of Myspace and Facebook, I believe. I haven’t been on there for nearly a fortnight and the feed held little interest to me. Near-daily âGramming from 2012 to 2019 was enough.
This was the back of Mum’s 1985 tax assessment slip from the IRD. Helvetica, in metal. The bold looks a bit narrow: a condensed cut, or just a compromised version because of the machinery used?
Not often seen, since by this time phototypesetting was the norm, though one reason Car magazine was a good read was its use of metal typesetting until very late in the game. I know there are many reasons the more modern forms of typesetting are superior, least of all fidelity to the designed forms, but there’s a literal depth to this that makes me nostalgic.
All galleries can be seen through the ‘Gallery’ link in the header, or click here (especially if you’re on a mobile device). I append to this entry through the month.
Last night, I uploaded a revised website for JY&A Consulting (jya.co), which I wrote and coded. Amanda came up with a lot of the good ideas for itâit was important to get her feedback precisely because she isnât in the industry, and I could then include people who might be looking to start a new venture while working from home among potential clients.
Publishing and fonts aside, it was branding that Iâm formally trained in, other than law, and since we started, Iâve worked with a number of wonderful colleagues from around the world as my âA teamâ in this sector. When I started redoing the site, and getting a few logos for the home page, I remembered a few of the old clients whose brands I had worked on. There are a select few, too, that Iâm never allowed to mention, or even hint at. Câest la vie.
There are still areas to play with (such as mobile optimization)âno new website is a fait accompli on day oneâand things I need to check with colleagues, but by and large what appears there is the look I want for 2021. And hereâs the most compelling reason for doing the update: the old site dated from 2012.
It was just one of those things: if workâs ticking along, then do you need to redo the site? But as we started a new decade, the old site looked like a relic. Twenty twelve was a long time ago: it was the year we were worried that the Mayans were right and their calendar ran out (the biggest doomsday prediction since Y2K?); that some Americans thought that Mitt Romney would be too right-wing for their country as he went up against Barack Obamaâwho said same-sex marriage should be legal that yearâin their presidential election; and Prince Harry, the party animal version, was stripping in Las Vegas.
It was designed when we still didnât want to scroll down a web page, when cellphones werenât the main tool to browse web pages with, and we filled it up with smart information, because we figured the people whoâd hire us wanted as much depth as we could reasonably show off on a site. We even had a Javascript slider animation on the home page, images fading into others, showing the work we had done.
Times have changed. A lot of what we can offer, we could express more succinctly. People seem to want greater simplicity on websites. We can have taller pages because scrolling is normal. As a trend, websites seem to have bigger type to accommodate browsing on smaller devices (having said that, every time we look at doing mobile versions of sites, as we did in the early 2000s, new technology came along to render them obsolete)âall while print magazines seem to have shrunk their body type! And we may as well show off, like so many others, that weâve appeared in The New York Times and CNNâplaces where Iâve been quoted as a brand guy and not the publisher of Lucire.
But, most importantly, we took a market orientation to the website: it wasnât developed to show off what we thought was important, but what a customer might think is important.
The old headingsââHumanistic branding and CSRâ, âBranding and the lawâ (the pages are still there, but unlinked from the main site)âmight show why weâre different, but theyâre not necessarily the reasons people might come to hire us. They still canâbut we do heaps of other stuff, too.
I might love that photo of me with the Medinge Group at la SorbonneâCELSA, but Iâm betting the majority of customers will ask, âWho cares?â or âHow does this impact on my work?â
As consumer requirements change, Iâm sure weâll have pages from today that seem irrelevant, in which case weâll have to get on to changing them as soon as possible, rather than wait nine years.
Looking back over the years, the brand consulting site has had quite a few iterations on the web. While I still have all these files offline, it was quicker to look at the Internet Archive, discovering an early incarnation in 1997 that was, looking back now, lacking. But some of our lessons in print were adoptedâpeople once thought our ability to bring in a print ĂŠsthetic was one of our skillsâand that helped it look reasonably smart in a late 1990s context, especially with some of the limited software we had.
We really did keep this till 2012, with updates to the news items, as far as I can make outâit looks like 2021 wasnât the first time I left things untouched for so long. But it got us work. In 2012, I thought I was so smart doing the table in the top menu, and you didnât need to scroll. And this incarnation probably got us less work.
Thereâs still a lot of satisfaction knowing that youâve coded your own site, and not relied on Wordpress or Wix. Being your own client has its advantages in terms of evolving the site and figuring out where everything goes. Itâs not perfect but thereâs little errant code here; everythingâs used to get that page appearing on the site, and hopefully you all enjoy the browsing experience. At least itâs no longer stuck in the early 2010s and hopefully makes it clearer about what we do. Your feedback, especially around the suitability of our offerings, is very welcome.
Two fantastic items in my Tweetstream today, the first from journalist Jehan Casinader, a New Zealander of Sri Lankan heritage, in Stuff.
Some highlights:
As an ethnic person, you can only enter (and stay in) a predominantly white space â like the media, politics or corporate leadership â if you play by the rules. And really, thereâs only one rule: blend in. Youâre expected to assimilate into the dominant way of thinking, acting and being âŠ
I sound like you. I make myself relatable to you. I communicate in a way that makes sense to you. I donât threaten you. I donât make you uncomfortable. And I keep my most controversial opinions to myself.
And:
Kiwis love stories about ethnic people who achieve highly: winning university scholarships, trying to cure diseases, inventing new technology or entering the political arena. These people are lauded for generating economic and social value for the country âŠ
We do not hear stories about ethnic people who work in thankless, low-skilled jobs â the refugees and migrants who stock our supermarket shelves, drive our taxis, pick our fruit, milk our cows, fill our petrol tanks, staff our hospitals and care for our elderly in rest homes.
Jehan says that now he is in a position of influence, heâs prepared to bring his Sri Lankan identity to the places he gets to visit, and hopes that everyone in Aotearoa is given respect ânot because of their ability to assimilateâ.
He was born here to new immigrants who had fled Sri Lanka, and I think there is a slight difference to those of us who came as children. Chief among this, at least for me, was my resistance to assimilation. Sure I enjoyed some of the same things other kids my age did: the Kentucky Fried Chicken rugby book, episodes of CHiPs, and playing tag, but because of various circumstances, as well as parents who calmly explained to me the importance of retaining spoken Cantonese at home, I constantly wore my Chineseness. I hadnât chosen to leave my birthplaceâthis was the decision of my parentsâso I hung on to whatever I could that connected me back to it.
I could contrast this to other Chinese New Zealanders I went to school with, many of whom had lost their native language because their parents had encouraged assimilation to get ahead. I canât fault themâmany of them are my dearest friendsâbut I was exposed to what Jehan wrote about from a young age.
It saddened me a lot because here were people who looked like me who I couldnât speak to in my mother tongue, and the only other student of Chinese extraction in my primary class who did speak her native language spoke Mandarinâwhich to many of my generation, certainly to those who did so little schooling before we left, find unintelligible.
At St Markâs, I had no issue. This was a school that celebrated differences, and scholastic achievement. (I am happy to say that sports and cultural activity are very much on the cards these days, too.) But after that, at one college, I observed what Jehan said: the Chinese New Zealanders who didnât rock the boat were safe buddies to have; those who were tall poppies were the target of the weak-minded, the future failures of our society. You just have to rise above it, and, if anything, it made me double-down on my characterâso much so that when I was awarded a half-scholarship to Scots, I found myself in familiar surroundings again, where differences were championed.
But you do indeed have to play the game. Want your company recognized? Then get yourself into the media. Issue releases just like the firms that were sending them to you as a member of the media. Donât bring your Chineseness into that, because you wonât get coverage. Jack Yan & Associates, and Lucire for that matter, always had a very occidental outlook, with my work taking me mostly to the US and Europe, with India only coming in at the end of the 2000sâbut then we were bound by the lingua franca of the old colonial power.
Despite my insistence on my own reo at home, and chatting every day to my Dad, I played the game that Jehan did when it came to work. I didnât as much when I ran for mayor, admittedlyâI didnât want voters to get a single-sided politician, but one who was his authentic selfâbut that also might explain why Stuffâs predecessor, which was at that stage owned by a foreign company, gave me next to no coverage the first time out. They werenât prepared to back someone who didnât fit their reader profile. The second time out, it still remained shockingly biased. Ironically the same publishing group would give me reasonably good coverage in Australia when I wasnât doing politics. Thatâs the price to pay for authenticity sometimes.
Jehan finishes his piece on a positive note and I feel he is right to. We still have issues as a nation, no doubt, but I think we embrace our differences more than we used to. There have been many instances where I have seen all New Zealanders rise up to condemn racism, regardless of their political bents. (What is interesting was I do recall one National MP still in denial, residing in fantasy-land, when I recalled a racist incidentâand this was after March 15, 2019!) People from all walks of life donated to my fund-raising when a friendâs car had a swastika painted on it. We have a Race Relationsâ Commissioner who bridges so many cultures effectivelyâa New Zealander of Taishanese extraction who speaks te reo MÄori and Englishâwho is visible, and has earned his mana among so many here. The fact that Jehanâs piece was even published, whereas in 2013 it would have been anathema to the local arm of Fairfax, is further reason to give me hope.
The second item? Have a watch of this. It’s largely in accord with my earlier post.
Before this gets recycled, I thought Iâd scan it as a memento: a 1986 printout off our Riteman dot matrix printer (which I still have, with spare cartridges), hooked up to a Commodore 64. I forget the printer interface. The image isnât mine: I only imagine that 14-year-old me was claiming copyright over the layout and text. To me this was all amazing. Dad bought a box of the line-flow paper from the computer store, I believe, a place called Einstein, run by a really nice guy called Raju Badiani (who also sold the computer system). Anything seemed possible, and by the summer of 1986â7 I was hacking the bits and bytes and creating my own bitmap fonts on the 64, trying to make it all look like Eurostile. Nothing as sophisticated as Emigre. The 5ÂŒ-inch floppies are still around somewhere!
As I begin this blog post, Autocade has just crossed the 22 million page-view barrier, at 22,000,040. I had estimated we would get there on Sunday, and as itâs just ticked over here in New Zealand, I was right.
We have 4,379 models in the database, with the Bestune B70, in its third generation, the most recent model added. Iâm grateful itâs a regular carânot yet another crossover, which has been the usual story of 2020 whenever I added new models to the site.
As crossovers and SUVs were once regarded as niche models, historical ones werenât put up in any great haste, so I canât always escape them just by putting up models from the past. However, there are countless sports and supercars to go up, so maybe Iâll need to add them in amongst the SUVs to maintain my sanity and happiness. These high-riding two-box vehicles are incredibly boring subjects stylistically.
Itâs a stroke of luck, then, to have the B70: Bestuneâs sole saloon offering now in amongst an entire range of crossovers. The saloons are the niche vehicles of 2020â1. Itâs a stylish motor, too: Cadillac looks for a middle-class price. Admittedly, such close inspirations havenât deserted China altogether, but this is, in my mind, no worse than Ford pretending its 1975 US Granada was a Mercedes-Benz for the masses. Itâs not going to get GMâs lawyers upset. And unlike the Granada, the B70 is actually a fairly advanced car, with refinement now on par with a lot of joint-venture models coming out of China.
You know the drill to track Autocadeâs growth:
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 10th million)
June 2017: 11,000,000 (four months for 11th million)
January 2018: 12,000,000 (seven months for 12th million)
May 2018: 13,000,000 (four months for 13th million)
September 2018: 14,000,000 (four months for 14th million)
February 2019: 15,000,000 (five months for 15th million)
June 2019: 16,000,000 (four months for 16th million)
October 2019: 17,000,000 (four months for 17th million)
December 2019: 18,000,000 (just under three months for 18th million)
April 2020: 19,000,000 (just over three months for 19th million)
July 2020: 20,000,000 (just over three-and-a-half months for 20th million)
October 2020: 21,000,000 (three months for 21st million)
January 2021: 22,000,000 (three months for 22nd million)
Not a huge change in the rate, then: for the past year we can expect roughly a million page views every three months. The database has increased by 96 model entries, versus 40 when I last posted about the million milestones.
In other publishing news, Jody Miller has managed to get an interview with Rachel Hunter. Her story is on Lucire today, and Iâm expecting a more in-depth one will appear in print later in 2021. Itâs taken us 23 years (not that we were actively pursuing): itâs just one of those things where it took that long for our paths to cross. Both Rachel and Lucire are Kiwi names that are arguably more noticed abroad than in our countries of birth, and I suppose itâs like two compatriots who travel to different countries. You donât always bump into one another.
I end this blog post with Autocadeâs views at 22,000,302.
Well, that was a rather sycophantic interview with Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, on Radio New Zealand, as the online encyclopĂŠdia turns 20.
So I was rather excited when a Tweeter said he was going to interview Wales and asked for questions from the public. I responded:
Why did your co-founder Larry Sanger accuse Wikipedia of being anti-expertise?
What are you doing to ensure that bad actors do not scam their way into senior editor positions?
Why is Wikipedia in English so much less reliable than Wikipedia in German or Japanese?
Letâs say theyâre not going to get asked. He wrote:
There's not really such a thing as a senior editor position. It is unlikely that a bad actor would make thousands of good edits just to get a reputation within the editor community only to then try to undermine the project. Openness means bad actors are identified quickly.
Semantics aside, are there not editors who rise up the ranks to have more editing privileges than others? They donât necessarily undermine the project within the Wikipedia domain. Happy to discuss more if youâre genuinely interested.
No reply. And of course there are senior editors: Wikipedians themselves use this term. I can only assume that it’s going to be another sycophantic interview. Why arenât some people willing to ask some hard ones here? I’m guessing that the only way tough questions are asked about tech is if a woman gets on to it (someone like Louise Matsakis or Sarah Lacy).
Thereâs plenty of evidence of all three of my positions, as documented here and elsewhere, and I didn’t even include a great question on bullying.
Iâm still blocked from seeing my advertising preferences on Facebook on the desktop, the only place where you can edit them, something that has plagued them for years and which theyâre unlikely to fix. I commonly say that Facebookâs databases are âshot to hell,â which Iâve believed for many years, and this is another example of it.
I can, however, see who has uploaded a list containing my private information to Facebook, and this ignominious bunch includes Amazon, Spotify (several subsidiaries), numerous American politicians, and others. Iâve never dealt with Spotify, or the politicians, so goodness knows how they have a list with my details, but to know theyâve been further propagated on to such an inhumane platform is disappointing.
I signed up to one New Zealand companyâs list at the end of December and already theyâve done the same.
This is a sure way for me to ask to cut off contact with you and demand my details be removed. Itâs also a sure way to earn a block of your Facebook page, if you have one.
While weâre on this subject, I notice Facebook claims:
Manage How Your Ads Are Personalized on Instagram
If you use Instagram, you can now choose whether to see personalized ads based on data from our partners. You make this choice in the Instagram app.
Actually, you canât, so thanks for lying again.
The only advertising settings available are âAd Activityâ (which shows the advertisements Iâve recently interacted with, and thatâs a blank list, natch), and âAd Topic Preferencesâ (where you can ask to see fewer ads on the topics of alcohol, parenting or pets). Unless Facebook has hidden them elsewhere on Instagram, this is more BS, just like how they claim theyâll block an account youâve reported. (They used to, but havenât done so for a long time, yet still claim they do.)
My friend Ian Ryder writes, âNo lesser names than Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Kevin Systrom (Instagram) have all taken action to ensure the safety of their own families from some of the dangers technology has created in our society today.â This is pretty telling, isnât it?
Postscript, January 4: I was surprised to receive another email from the company.
It does not appear to be their fault as their email system, from a company called hubspotemail.net, claims I have been removed, yet keeps sending. I won’t file a complaint as it’s obvious that Hubspot is unreliable.
Post-postscript, January 5: My lovely Amanda says these folks aren’t back to work till January 18, so they might not even know about the list being uploaded to Facebook. I should be interested to find out if that’s been automated by Hubspotâin which case anyone using it needs to be aware what it’s doing in their name, and whether it matches what they’re saying in their T&Cs.
Post-post-postscript, January 13: The company has responded even before they’ve gone back to work, and confirmed my details have now been removed. They took it really seriously, which I’m grateful for. The upload function was indeed automated, but they say that with the removal of my details, the Facebook list will also automatically update. Their T&Cs will also be updated, so I say good on them for being genuine and transparent.
