The reality of Chinese Language Week for many Chinese New Zealanders

‘Chinese Language Week’ has rolled around again, and if you look on Twitter, there are plenty of Chinese New Zealanders (myself included) and our allies miffed about this. And we get the usual trolls come by. First up, it’s not Chinese Language Week. It’s Mandarin Language Week. I have no problem with the promotion of […]

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Testing the search engines: Bing likes antiquity; most favour HTML over PHP

Bing is spidering new pages, as long as they’re very, very old. Last week, we added a handful of Lucire pages from 1998 and 1999. An explanation is given here. And I’ve spotted at least two of those among Bing’s results when I do a site:lucire.com search. As a couple of newer pages have also […]

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Rare: an Asus product not lasting the distance; awaiting its successor

I see it was only 19 months ago since I bought the Asus ROG Strix Evolve mouse. A mouse that cost several times what a regular one does, claiming the switches would last 50 million clicks. It has now developed a fault, and I wouldn’t even consider myself a heavy user. I’m certainly not a […]

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The Lucire tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II

I wrote the below in Lucire—even though plenty of publications have covered our monarch’s passing, it still felt right to acknowledge it. After all, she had appeared in Lucire a few times.   With the passing of HM Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday UK time, it would be remiss of this magazine to not mark […]

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Testing the seven search engines in the world

After reading Mojeek’s blog post from last July, I learned there are only seven search engines in the world now. In other words, I was checking more search engines out in the 1990s. It’s rather depressing, especially as the search market is largely a monopoly with Google dominating it (and all the ills that brings), […]

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Putting the search engines through their paces

One more, and I might give the subject a rest. Here I test the search engines for the term Lucire. This paints quite a different picture. Lucire is an established site, dating from 1997, indexed by all major search engines from the start. The word did not exist online till the site began. It does […]

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A new video for the home page

Earlier today, Amanda and I had a wonderful time at Te Papa to celebrate the Chinese Languages in Aotearoa programme. My contribution was appearing in a video, that was on this blog last October. It dawned on me that despite being on YouTube, this really needs to be on the home page of this website, […]

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The very simple Maramataka and Chinese lunar calendar conversion table

When I first started commemorating Matariki a few years ago, I had figured out, since both ancient Māori and Chinese worked out the lunar calendar, that it was roughly five lunar months after ours. I was also told that it marked the Māori New Year. Maybe it’s due to local iwi, but my recollection was […]

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Stanley Moss’s latest Global Brand Letter out now

Finally, a happier post. For many years (since 2004), my dear friend Stanley Moss has been publishing his Global Brand Letter, which is not only a wonderful summary of the year (or the last half-year, since he often writes every six months) in branding, but an excellent record of the evolution of culture.    He […]

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Lucire’s Twitter account is back

I can’t yet reveal why, but I’ve come across the work of Hong Kong-trained and based designer Caroline Li, and it’s really good. She’s done a lot of book covers, and I know first-hand how hard it is to have a small canvas to work from. Maybe I’m just used to magazines. Check out her […]

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