Thank you to VUW’s Alumni as Mentors programme

It’s not every day your Alma Mater gives you an award. I was very humbled to be recognized tonight by Victoria University of Wellington for my contribution to the Alumni as Mentors programme. The hard work is really the VUW team’s, who do such an amazing job matching us with students, and providing resources and […]

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I’ve seen that episode of Hustle

A young man who reminded me of a confidence trickster I knew (who is now serving time at His Majesty’s pleasure) approached me today on Lambton Quay. ‘I wonder if you could help me,’ he said. ‘I’ve just had my 25th birthday but woke up with all my stuff gone. I live in the Wairarapa […]

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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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On the mayoral races in Wellington and Toronto: Tory for us, not for them

Almost makes you want to run for mayor again. I had a look at my 2013 manifesto during the weekend and it wasn’t half bad. And, with respect to our candidates in Wellington, each of whom I know socially (and politics aside, actually like), it goes into more detail, and is arguably more visionary, than […]

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Autocade slowly gets to 29 million page views

It took a while, but Autocade has now finally reached 29 million page views. The stats’ page since the count was reset shows 1,362,506 views. Add that to the 27,647,011 recorded on March 19, 2022, and we have well and truly crossed the 29 million mark (by 9,517, in fact). We probably got there yesterday […]

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The Red Points saga: this might finally be resolved

Nine days since the first DMCA notice was lobbed against us, the saga has finally reached the powers-that-be at Hearst SL. And once it did, things began happening quickly. I’ve heard from their head of legal, and what he’s outlined to me seems like a good resolution to the whole saga. He tells me some […]

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Companies worth millions engaging in fraud, and Google is their weapon

Yesterday morning, we received a second notice with two more URLs—one with wholly our own content—from Hearst SL and its contractor, Red Points Solution SL. I’ve done a bit more digging and it’s usually fraudsters who engage in this behaviour. You can read more about them in Techdirt, Mashable and Search Engine Land. With their […]

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False accusations from Red Points Solution SL

Yesterday, I returned to find a DMCA claim filed against us by Red Points Solution SL, purporting to act for Harper’s Bazaar España publisher Hearst Magazines SL, falsely accusing us of breaching their copyright with this article. You can read the notice here. Naturally, I filed a counter-claim because their accusation is baseless. Our source […]

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Updating old pages since the experts are wrong

With all the odd results coming up in site searches—it’s not restricted to Bing—I attended to some of the older pages on our websites. Curiously, in a site:lucire.com search, even Google has our 2005 competition page up high, namely in fifth. There is only one link from our site internally to this page. I know […]

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