Keep the parliamentary term as it is

Rumblings about extending our three-year parliamentary term to four surface from time to time. I don’t think we should change a thing, more so in the era of coalition governments under MMP. And it shouldn’t matter which side of the fence you sit. The length of the term should be inversely proportional to the power […]

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The crunch time media face is nothing new

  Talking Points Memo showed the amounts programmatic advertising brought in to them over the last eight years. (The above graphic is from their card preview on Mastodon.) I’ve never been convinced of programmatic since no one in the ad business could ever explain it in plain language. I say just figure out what’s on […]

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Additional endorsements for the Autocade Yearbook 2024

To get one endorsement from the brilliant and unequalled Giles Chapman is wonderful. To get two is amazing.   Been so enjoying Jack Yan’s first Autocade Yearbook 2024, an annual in the grand style, with lots of thoughtful deep-reads about new and classic cars. Fascinating for being a tangible print book with digital roots. Check […]

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Autocade reaches 35 million page views, the latest million in 41 days

Autocade hit the 35 million mark two days ago, in well under two months, buoyed by days of over 60,000 page views per day. I saw other jumps in the 20,000-a-day mark, even 50,000 on some other days. The last two days alone saw 43,000 page views, bringing today’s total to 7,402,333 since the server […]

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Robert Vanwey on whom to boycott

It’s hard to find fault with Robert Vanwey’s ‘Who to Boycott’, subtitled ‘There are some in business who treat workers like property’. Note: for those who don’t like Substack, you might not wish to click through. But I gave my word to Rob I would link it because I was impressed by his thinking and […]

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We need to serve the technology with the new pay-by-plate meters

We need to change our habits slightly with the new pay-by-plate meters in Wellington City, as I discovered. If I arrive in town for, say, two 90-minute meetings with, say, 15 minutes between them, what I might do after the first is to move my car. I might also put a bit of extra money […]

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Twenty years of blogging

First up, as I’ve publicly posted this and have helped out myself, my friend and colleague Hasan Abu Afash is in Palestine, and I don’t need to tell you what he and his people are facing. If you can help out, here’s a link to his Paypal.   Apparently, August 11, 2023 marked my 20 […]

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Who leads when the house of cards falls?

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 […]

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Autocade reaches 34 million page views

  We crossed the 34 million page view mark at Autocade a few days ago, with the counter currently on 6,444,257. Add that to the 27,647,011 that we netted before the old server was decommissioned, that’s 34,091,268. The site is sitting on 4,872 models, quite a few of which were uploaded while I put together […]

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Refreshing the body type on the Lucire site

EB Garamond 12 on the Lucire website.   Not exactly earth-shattering news, but we’ve changed the body type on the Lucire website from Bembo to EB Garamond 12. The cut of Bembo that we had didn’t feature macronized vowels—a big omission here in Aotearoa—though most recently it was a Latvian name, Elīna Arāja, which it […]

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