The non-work stuff.
The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]
Read More… from For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward
We’ve reached 5,000 models on Autocade, after 16 years. The 5,000th model entry was for the Xiaomi SU7, the first car from the Chinese cellphone brand. This wasn’t random: when I realized we had hit 4,999, I thought about what we could mark the 5,000-model milestone with. The most aerodynamic electric production car in the […]
Asking the tough questions on Mastodon. Very tiny samples, and I was limited to four possible answers—but now you know. Meanwhile, I see Linkedin has not been very good at removing misinformation about me. Not as bad as Quora, but still down there. The latest post says ‘jackyan’ is a metaphor for […]
Read More… from Two Mastodon polls: on 50 shades of Grade, and the best non-Bond Roger Moore film
I’m not sure why the history page about my ancestor, 甄舜河 (Gin Sun Hall), has disappeared from the family association’s page, but for others who are descended from him, here’s his pic from the Internet Archive. He lived in the late 13th century. Also from the Archive was this extract from a 1997 publication […]
A seven-year-old needs to figure this out: what would the Ford Escort Popular Plus be priced at if were assembled in Aotearoa? Amanda and I were chatting about prodigies. Some young people are amazing, doing uni classes at intermediate or high-school age, or playing piano like Mozart, and while not all of us have […]
Read More… from You never know where your interests will take you
Some impressive stats from all of you out there in cyberspace: thank you! Autocade’s counter is currently at 6,784,553. When I last blogged about reader stats on the 22nd, it was 6,444,257. (These numbers begin counting from when the site was reinstalled in February 2022.) As the counter only updates once a day, we […]
Scott Burchill makes a good analysis in Pearls and Irritations on how the US is ‘a rogue state’ and becoming a pariah (alongside Israel) over recent events in Gaza, and how its influence is waning. It’s hard to argue with a lot of his points; certainly here, with the exception of some politicians who either […]
There’s a lot to report now that the news is public: Autocade is more than the online encyclopædia, it’s also a print yearbook. I’m happy to say it has been launched, after ironing out some tech issues, and there has been good interest in the new publication. You can read a bit more about […]
With the passing of Richard Roundtree, I feel it only appropriate to repost photos of my childhood Shaft’s Big Score pencil case. My original post where these were featured is here, and today’s Mastodon post here. I know Richard was also in Roots (remembered it, but way too young to have understood it […]
In a Mastodon conversation, Andrew Ryan (well known to many car aficionados as ‘The Car Factoids’) reminded me of the infamous ITC white Jag—the Jaguar Mk I that plunges into a quarry, originally filmed for The Baron. I wanted to share with him a page to which I had contributed that included all the […]
Read More… from The history of the ITC white Jaguar Mk I, recovered