It’s true. I spent time on business development, answering emails, doing tech stuff on our sites, and generally kept on top of things. I often wonder if I would have become an active Facebooker or Tweeter had they been invented and come into my orbit in, say, 2002. We all may have been too busy […]
Month: February 2020
Why I don’t sign up to new online ad networks in a hurry
In the early days, banner advertising was pretty simple. By the turn of the century, we dealt with a couple of firms, Burst Media and Gorilla Nation, and we had a few buy direct. Money was good. This is the pattern today if we choose to say yes to anyone representing an ad network. […]
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Could this happen one day at GM?
The MG line-up in New Zealand. Could it be part of a bigger portfolio of brands later this decade? In the context of what has happened with Holden, and Peter Hanenberger’s thoughts on the direction of GM, I wonder how far away we are from seeing these headlines: Cash-strapped GM sells passenger car brands to […]
Social media produce some terrible clairvoyants
I see Billie Eilish is singing the next James Bond title song, and it sounds pretty good. The last one, ‘Writing’s on the Wall’, wasn’t one of my favourites and while I didn’t mind Sam Smith’s composition, I felt a female voice might have suited it better. On a Bond music forum on Facebook […]
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Peter Hanenberger’s unintended post mortem of Holden
The 2009 Chevrolet Caprice SS, sold in the Middle East but made in Australia. I came across a 2017 interview with former Holden chairman Peter Hanenberger, who was in charge when the company had its last number-one sales’ position in Australia. His words are prescient and everything he said then still applies today. He […]
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One News is hard to miss on TV, but hidden on the internet
I wanted to see what TV1 news (I can never remember its official name with all its rebrands over the years—is it One Network News, TVNZ1 News, One News, or something else?) had on GM’s decision to shut Holden, but I missed both the six o’clock and the Plus One screenings. I headed online with […]
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Asus ROG Strix Evolve: a gaming mouse for a non-gamer
My early 2000s Microsoft Intellimouse 1·1 is still the perfect shape for me. After getting the second-hand one into service last year, I thought that I needed a spare. I’ve several other mice, including no-brand ones, that are a decent size, but I got used to having the forward and back buttons on either side. […]
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The death of Holden
GM pulled out of Russia and India, so with hindsight, those of us Down Under, with a far smaller total population, shouldn’t have thought we were particularly special. Even where GM remains, such as South Korea, there’s a broken model range, with a big gap where the Cruze used to be. It’s becoming […]
Returning to Firefox?
I wonder if it’s time to return to Firefox after an absence of two years and five months. After getting the new monitor, the higher res makes Firefox’s and Opera GX’s text rendering fairly similar (though Chrome, Vivaldi and Edge remain oddly poor, and Vivaldi’s tech people haven’t been able to replicate my bug). There’s […]
In the 1980s, I thought society would evolve to become more efficient and smarter
Growing up in a relatively wealthy country in the 1980s, after getting through most of the 1970s, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the world would just keep getting better and things would make more sense as humans evolved. From a teenager’s perspective: home computers, with a modulator–demodulator (modem), could bring you information instantaneously […]
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