The shame of Russia (courtesy of Facebook)

17.03.2014/08.02

At the weekend, 40,000 to 50,000 took to the streets of Moskva—Moscow—to protest their government’s actions in the Ukraine, at the Peace and Freedom March. I understand that media called the country’s actions ‘the shame of Russia’. A friend provided me with photos of the protest that he and his friends took, which I […]

Do mayoral candidates dream of electric sheep?

16.02.2014/12.30

The original link is long gone, but I sure wish the media here did its job during the 2013 mayoral election and administered the Voigt-Kampff (I know it was spelt differently in the movie) test from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. This was from The Wave, 11 years ago, during San […]

This week it’s the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit models; what’s next for our destination marketing?

09.02.2014/09.51

In Lucire’s publication history, more Americans than New Zealanders have read from the title. Online, that was always the case, as we started off in 1997 with a 70 per cent US readership, which has dropped to around 42 per cent with other countries catching up with web browsing over the last 16 years. […]

Frack away, IGas Energy: the Metropolitan Police has your back

06.02.2014/10.10

The spirit of Gene Hunt is alive and well in the Greater Manchester Police, in the form of Sgt David Kehoe. Arresting someone over drink driving when he has neither drunk nor driven reminds me of The Professionals episode, ‘In the Public Interest’, about a corrupt police force in an unnamed English city outside […]

Four million page views on Autocade

09.01.2014/11.39

I came across an old blog post that showed that Autocade took four years to get 2,000,000 page views: not bad for an encyclopædia that receives very little promotion. That was in March 2012. It has since crossed 4,000,000, which meant the second 2,000,000 took 21 months to achieve (in December 2013). If the growth […]

Sounds familiar? Works on all browsers, except for IE8

29.12.2013/08.31

I’m sure this is familiar to anyone who has done web development. Lucire has a new home page and the tests show: Firefox on Mac, Windows, Ubuntu: OK Chromium on Windows: OK IE9 and IE10: OK Safari on Mac OS X, Iphone and Ipad: OK Dolphin on Android: OK A really old version of Seamonkey […]

Steve Guttenberg shows us how a Kiwi accent is done

27.12.2013/08.54

Back in September, The Dominion Post claimed on its front page that I have an ‘accent’ that is holding me back. It was a statement which the editor-in-chief subsequently apologized for, and which she had removed from the online edition—you can judge for yourself here if the claim was a falsehood. Still, despite having lived […]

Business etiquette 101: don’t threaten lawsuits against a customer proposing an idea which you later adopt

30.11.2013/06.00

Interesting to spot this link. When I started Autocade in 2008, I approached Haymarket, letting them know I was a Classic and Sportscar reader since it began in the 1980s, and I was inspired by the Sedgwick guides that it ran then. Autocade was to be an online cyclopædia that would use a brief format, […]

Google pays out US$17 million over Doubleclick privacy hacking

20.11.2013/02.05

When surfing, there are precious few people who, like me, de-Googled their lives. There’s the odd blog post here and there, but, overall, those of us who took the plunge are few and far between. It still puzzles me, given the regular privacy problems that I find on Google Dashboard (Google supporters will argue that […]

Responding to blog comments—and where to from here?

28.10.2013/23.49

Wordpress, with its automatic deactivation of Jetpack after each update, messed up, so I have no metrics for the last two months of this blog. Nor did it send me emails notifying me of your comments. It would have been useful to know how the last couple of posts went, to gauge your reaction to […]