A long time ago, in a newsroom far, far away …

  Star Wars fans with a sense of humour will love Chris Barker’s Deathstar Express, which had been popping up on social media this year. He’s put almost all of his mock front pages on one web page. When you think about it, and I’m sure Chris had, how do you keep the population in […]

Read More… from A long time ago, in a newsroom far, far away …



Most of HR isn’t about finding the right candidate

A friend in the UK recently told me: I read how companies say they cannot find anyone to fill their roles, and I have a bunch of very talented, highly qualified friends who are out of work who can’t find anything. Having looked into this locally, it’s far from being a strictly UK problem. I […]

Read More… from Most of HR isn’t about finding the right candidate



A second excellent piece by Eda Tang: where New Zealand Chinese Language Week gets its money

  Eda Tang’s excellent piece revealing that New Zealand Chinese Language Week receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Chinese Communist Party came out last week, but unfortunately illness kept me from blogging about it properly. It was to have been my final post for September. Many of us suspected this from the start, […]

Read More… from A second excellent piece by Eda Tang: where New Zealand Chinese Language Week gets its money



Nice to be back on The Panel

David McCallum with Melinda Fee and Craig Stevens in The Invisible Man. (Who’d have guessed? Illya Kuryakin and Peter Gunn on the same show!)   Haven’t had this much fun on RNZ’s The Panel ever—since for once I knew my fellow panellist, Alison Mau. Both Ali and I weren’t in the studio with Wallace Chapman, […]

Read More… from Nice to be back on The Panel



‘Google.com is blocked’—good riddance

This error message began creeping up this week:     google.com is blocked google.com refused to connect. ERR_BLOCKED_BY_RESPONSE   And appears with increasing frequency. Maybe Google is too poor to be able to serve everyone? I’ve noticed the search results worsen, as this blog’s covered. Is this the reason I can’t use it any more? […]

Read More… from ‘Google.com is blocked’—good riddance



Being part of the problem, but not seeing it

There’s no big secret that I changed high schools, from one where the experience was less than stellar to Scots College, where I felt like I fitted perfectly. During my second mayoral campaign, an old boy of the first place, Rongotai College, wrote to me via my feedback form sitting on his high horse, wondering […]

Read More… from Being part of the problem, but not seeing it



Google News continues bias against independent media

This is by no means a new complaint, but if you want to give a non-sinister explanation, then the idea that Google is too poor to build its search capability has to be one of them. And that it’s been poor for the good part of a decade. More sinister is the idea that all […]

Read More… from Google News continues bias against independent media



A celebration of Chinese languages by The Post

  I take my hat off to Eda Tang of The Post (formerly The Dominion Post) for highlighting six Chinese New Zealanders and our reo tūpuna (ancestral languages). As many of us said last year (and for many years prior) during “Chinese Language Week” (NZCLW), it’s not all about Mandarin, a relatively new tongue that […]

Read More… from A celebration of Chinese languages by The Post



Forget the “shoulds”

My Lucire interview with Bay Area designer Devan Gregori has gone online—it’ll likely appear in print afterwards with different visuals. Devan has a wonderful story about how she came to be a fashion designer, and it’s very different to those who fell into the trade through a childhood interest or watching their grandmother sew. I […]

Read More… from Forget the “shoulds”



‘Fake it till you make it’ isn’t a legal doctrine

Some say, ‘Fake it till you make it,’ as a positive thing. In fact, a very dear friend used to say it, and it did him a lot of good. But then, he’s an honest sort of chap and he never promised something he couldn’t deliver. His take on faking it was to present a […]

Read More… from ‘Fake it till you make it’ isn’t a legal doctrine