Posts relating to New Zealand.
Promoting DuckDuckGo: ‘Glancing back’ in Lucire KSA, June 2021. For some time now, in every print issue of Lucire, and Lucire KSA, there is a mention of search engine DuckDuckGo. But I wasn’t sure how long we had been doing this, till I checked tonight. We started referencing DuckDuckGo in 2012, on our history page, […]
Read More… from Nine years of promoting DuckDuckGo in Lucire
Being self-employed my whole adult life, I haven’t exactly been let go from actual employment, but there have been some gigs, paid and unpaid, that came to an end without me expecting it. I’ve never been sore about losing them, but I don’t agree with the way they were done. Gig 1. Did […]
As sent to Vodafone New Zealand today. Anyone know what might be going on? Hi there: Not really a complaint but since you don’t give any options other than compliment and complaint, the latter will have to do! Since moving to Tawa, my landline phone has been calling numbers that no one […]
Why are there antitrust or monopoly laws? Why is the usual interpretation of the Chicago School really, really bad for the United States? Umair Haque’s latest post spells it out pretty well, in my opinion. Just an idea: let’s not import any of their dangerous ideas into our society, or allow their ever-growing giants […]
Read More… from Facebook goes even more pro-bot with change in group policy
Yesterday, I worked remotely, and I don’t know what possessed me, but as OneDrive was activated on my laptop, I decided to save a word processing file there, planning to grab it from my desktop machine later in the day. Normally I would just leave the file where it was and transfer it across the […]
Conversation with Mum, some time in the 1980s. The credits for St Elsewhere begin rolling, and they read, ‘and starring William Daniels as Dr. Mark Craig’. Two taller actors flank Daniels as they walk toward the camera. I say, ‘Mum, that’s the guy who plays KITT on Knight Rider.’ She replies, ‘He’s […]
Read More… from Other than the ending, this is my only memory of St Elsewhere
‘We can’t level, you crazy bastard, we’re in advertising!’—Paul Reiser as Stephen Bachman, in Crazy People (1990) Signal You can run ads with misinformation, and you can launch bot nets of thousands of accounts, but what can’t you do on Facebook? Buy ads that expose their tools with which you have bought their […]
Read More… from How to get your Facebook ad account shut down: do something honest
When I was a kid and wanted to hit back at someone for being mean to me, my parents would often say that successful people, true leaders, would be 大方, which is roughly akin to saying that one should rise above it. I would say that goes with nations as well: you can tell when […]
Read More… from A brief misadventure into the Chinese internet
While I saw Vodafone’s Super Wifi commercials, I never thought to act on them, since (mistakenly) I thought it was something to do with cellphones. Might have been the gadgets they used in the commercial. But, after talking to Raghu, their sales’ rep in Pune, a city outside of Mumbai that I know well, […]
Read More… from What Vodafone’s Super Wifi is really like in practice
While I care much more about when John Simm will grace our screens again (pun intended), it was hard to avoid the reality TV that gets beamed into our living rooms during prime-time. There is the disgusting Married at First Sight Australia, where I am speechless with shock that fellow Scots alumnus John Aiken appears […]
Read More… from I can finally identify with the main character in a New Zealand TV show