Happy New Year to all readers! Year of the Rabbit: it’s certainly been a nice start to it here with beautiful, calm weather (especially after the winds yesterday). Blessings to you all! And exactly four (lunar) months to Matariki. None of this newfangled solar-calendar Pope Gregory stuff for us here in the eastern hemisphere, […]
Category: New Zealand
Posts relating to New Zealand.
There’s got to be a morning after Quora
This blog post was originally published at Social Media NZ. Michael Moore-Jones has written a post in response here. I read with interest Michael Moore-Jones’s review of Quora. He is very enthusiastic about the new website, and with some good reasons. I’m still in the “wait and see” camp. I joined, part of that […]
How will Chevrolet go down in Korea?
Last week, GM announced it would drop the Daewoo marque, as it has done through Europe, in its native Korea, in favour of Chevrolet. The company will also be renamed GM Korea, a name it once had nearly four decades ago. While most will think this makes sense, so GM can concentrate on […]
Opel is not a snob brand
Arthur Daley, Opel’s last New Zealand spokesman: ‘Never mind the Capri, Tel: I sell Opels now.’ In the Fairfax Press, General Motors has apparently confirmed it will bring in Opel-branded cars to sell alongside Holden-branded ones. It’s an obvious move. For years, a good part of Holden’s range was Opel-designed. Like Vauxhall, the model […]
All I wanted to do was to say, ‘Thank you,’ to Telstra Clear
I seem to be to computers what Frank Spencer is to life. Long-time readers will know that in 2009, Vox locked me out. We went round and round for months, with the company suggesting all sorts of solutions, usually putting the blame back on me or the ISP. I had tried logging in […]
Read More… from All I wanted to do was to say, ‘Thank you,’ to Telstra Clear
What the suck?
I think Telstra Clear’s Captcha for its Customer Zone is broken. I wish I took screen shots of each failed attempt now, since it’s kicked me off after five tries. But this one was intriguing. I never expected to see a quaint s, especially in a context as digital as a Captcha, in usage […]
Ziln shifts to promoting Kiwi content
Initially I was disappointed to lose the foreign channels on Ziln, the New Zealand service that was broadcasting DW-TV, TV5 Monde, al-Jazeera English, etc. When I wrote to them, one of its bosses replied—on Christmas Day! He explained to me that Ziln’s focus had changed to promoting New Zealand content, so if I knew […]
The changing accent of Gillian Anderson
Gillian Anderson, Chicago-born, star of The X Files, grew up in North London and speaks with an accent that’s closer to Britain than the States. I noticed that she gets quite a bit of flak for this on YouTube comments, which is rather sad, perhaps revealing more about those who criticize her than anything else. […]
Reality TV is not everything non-fiction
I found it very odd that Antiques Roadshow and Mythbusters were nominated for the reality TV category at the Emmy Awards. Based on the vocabulary I grew up with, these are not ‘reality TV’. I doubt many of us over a certain age would think of The Gong Show or New Zealand’s Top Town […]
Civility is a good thing
Baidu Talk, which launched in September, has netted 1 million users already, according to PC World. Michael Kan reports that thanks to the service’s insistence that no aliases are used (registered users’ identities are verified with the People’s Republic’s government) ‘this has led to more “civil” discussions between users on Baidu Talk.’ It shows […]