What search engines show in their top 10 isn’t always relevant

The Bing collapse did lead me to look at some of the ancient pages on the Lucire site that the search engines were still very fond of. For instance, the ‘About’ page was still appearing up top, which is bizarre since we haven’t made any links to it for years—it reflected our history in 2004. […]

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Rising popularity on Autocade

Ever since we had to reset the counter for Autocade in March, because of a new server and a new version of Mediawiki, it’s been interesting to see which pages are most popular. The old ranking took into account everything from March 2008 to March 2022. With everything set to zero again, I can now […]

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A new video for the home page

Earlier today, Amanda and I had a wonderful time at Te Papa to celebrate the Chinese Languages in Aotearoa programme. My contribution was appearing in a video, that was on this blog last October. It dawned on me that despite being on YouTube, this really needs to be on the home page of this website, […]

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If corporate America says it, it’s probably untrue

Le dernier.   I see the Le Snak range has now left us, after its US owner PepsiCo cited a lack of demand. I call bullshit, since during 2021 it was becoming increasingly difficult to find them on the shelves. Throttling distribution is not the same as a lack of demand, something you see time […]

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The very simple Maramataka and Chinese lunar calendar conversion table

When I first started commemorating Matariki a few years ago, I had figured out, since both ancient Māori and Chinese worked out the lunar calendar, that it was roughly five lunar months after ours. I was also told that it marked the Māori New Year. Maybe it’s due to local iwi, but my recollection was […]

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My notes from RNZ’s The Panel, Wednesday, June 22

I write notes for my appearances on RNZ’s The Panel, and while I don’t read them verbatim, they are useful for copying and pasting into this blog afterwards. (Anyone who has ever attended a conference where I’ve spoken might find this familiar: I’ll upload the notes but they aren’t a word-for-word reflection of what I […]

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We have been warned

Let fellow Tweeters have the say on today’s events in the USA. I feel 0 smugness about living in NZ right now. America is exporting their brand of fascism. It’s already here. We are 18 months from a potential change in government. We’ve seen how quickly a country goes backwards. I was there for it. […]

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The missing second verse

The second of three verses of the Scots College school song appears to be missing from the web. I posted them once on Facebook, back when people used Facebook, so of course it doesn’t appear in Google. We sang it, but I understand that the generation before, and the one after, didn’t sing it. We […]

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Political coverage is not based around merit

How fascinating. Eight years ago, I had high hopes for this Christopher Luxon, according to this blog. Who knew that as a politician, the guy would really let me down? I Tweeted: Remember how the Dom Post treated me in two elections? This is the opposite. A lot of the media love their rich white […]

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Send out warmth, get it back

I’ve had a nice resolution after reaching out to FashioNZ over their Instagram tagline and a claim made on their website. There was a delay in their response due to the site being sold to its fifth owners (I must be out of touch, as I never knew who the second and third were!), but […]

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