Contacting Right Now (a misnomer of a company name)

If there’s one employee I can never fault at Telstra Clear, it’s Daniel Borgshammar, who has been following up my case with my corrupted custhelp.com profile on the Telstra Clear support site since day one.    Unfortunately, Daniel has his hands tied. He contacts the people at Right Now, the owners of custhelp.com, and keeps […]

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The internet collapses further: Telstra Clear’s DNS servers stop resolving some addresses

Yet another contact Facebook-messaged me tonight to tell me that his email to me bounced. Sadly, I had to repeat the story of how emails from New Zealand now regularly bounce, that with at least one party we’ve had to resort to using the fax, and that, if he had a Hotmail or a Gmail, […]

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Occupy, the brand

VBlessNYC, under Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic It was in the fourth quarter of the year that Occupy became a brand. Just capitalize it, and everyone knows what you mean. The original geographical indicator of Wall Street disappeared—to be fair, it began disappearing when similar protests began happening across the United States and then, the world—but I’ve […]

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Storm in a teacup on tape

The ‘tea tape’ that’s been on the news for the last week or so seems like, if you’ll pardon the analogy, a storm in a teacup.    PM John Key and Epsom candidate John Banks invited the media to record them chatting, then dismissed them. One cameraman, Bradley Ambrose, left a recorder on the table. […]

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The spam commenters’ arsenal revealed

As most people are, I’m pretty sick of comment spammers. Wordpress does a reasonable job of keeping them out (though Akismet has been missing a lot more of them lately, putting them into the comment queue). Today, one of our comment spammers must have slipped. Instead of using just one of the lines in his […]

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Intellectual property doesn’t deserve a black mark, but some powers-that-be do

After being interviewed about the outcome of the ‘Wellywood’ sign vote yesterday (a summary of what I told Newstalk ZB can be found on my Facebook fan page) I was reminded about how a few Wellingtonians, who supported my quest to stop the sign in 2010 and 2011, were not that thrilled that I used […]

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Today’s adventures with US dollars and New Zealand banks

Above: I’m Asian, and I want banking. National Bank gets me again. (For that story, click here.) Out of the businesses I have, one is unincorporated, and it has a US dollar bank account based in New Zealand. Over the years, it’s been at numerous banks, and was at the ANZ.    Until the ANZ […]

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Google Plus: the penny drops; Facebook announces it’s taking away a feature it took away two months ago

Looks like people are now being more fair and balanced about Google Plus, instead of drinking the Google Kool-Aid as they did at the site’s launch.    Farhad Manjoo, in Slate, writes: Even Google’s own executives seem to have gotten bored by the site. After several public posts in the summer, co-founders Larry Page and […]

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Do you engage a fax spammer?

The anti-spam legislation in New Zealand was extended to faxes on October 20—although, technically, junk faxes were disallowed under the Telecommunications Act, based on my reading, and always were.    It hasn’t stopped one company from continuing to send junk faxes, and I’ve reported their three post-October 20 ones to the Department of Internal Affairs […]

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It’s the 1st of the month, so Facebook Timeline stops updating

I know I’m not alone on this, as I have heard from two other Facebook friends, but Facebook has trouble getting to a new month with Timeline.    Ever since my Facebook went to November 1, Timeline stopped updating. What rests there is the last post of October 31.    Earlier today, I could still […]

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