A tribute to Mission: Impossible’s nice guy

Maybe I plain did not watch the news on the 15th—goodness knows what I was doing to have missed that Peter Graves, best known for his portrayal of Jim Phelps in Mission: Impossible, passed away, after suffering a heart attack. Today would have been his 84th birthday.    I am a huge fan of Mission: […]

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The rise of the city brand

I don’t have the other writers’ permission to show their side of this Facebook dialogue, but we had been chatting about growing the creative clusters here in Wellington as one of my mayoral policies.    I wrote: Mostly by focusing on growing creative clusters and taking a bigger slice of the cake. So it is […]

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Hints of Google’s privacy misbehaviours in 2007

I did my last edits to this blog’s pages that had resided on the old Blogger service today, before decommissioning them from the service. After today (in theory, since the updating stalled twice as I wrote this), you will not be able to make any more comments on posts written before January 1, 2010.   […]

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Do schools kill creativity?

Stefan Engeseth pasted this to his blog over the weekend, and it’s one of the best TED talks. As Stefan has investigated child behaviour himself, I can see the relevance. But even for the rest of us, it’s a thoroughly entertaining talk by Sir Ken Robinson in 2006 that has some wonderful touchpoints—and humour. It’s […]

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An unplanned post about Google (Friend Connect this time)

The disappearance of my Google Friend Connect gadget from the right-hand column was not part of my plans to de-Google my life: after all, it took me a while to amass the followers there (I think I had a mere 18, but some of them were friends).    From my Google Dashboard, I noticed there […]

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Jailed Minnesota Toyota owner may get retrial

You can’t help but wonder (without reading the court transcripts and judgement) how the sentencing of Koua Fong Lee could be so harsh. In 2006, Lee’s Toyota Camry, with his pregnant wife, daughter, brother and father on board, accelerated out of control and smashed into an Oldsmobile, killing three people in the second car back […]

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Anyone else with a new Google results’ page?

Anyone else have a different results’ page layout for Google? Only began happening this morning (NZDT) to me, though I imagine others must have this by now.    Despite my fairly regular moans about technology, I seem to be among the first to get some features. I remember getting the Digg Toolbar about two or […]

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I don’t have Gmail. So how did I get a Buzz account again?

Can someone please explain to me how I have a Google Buzz account?    Yes, I know, all those people complaining about Google Buzz found that their Gmail contacts where, all of a sudden, added to the service.    And Google, this week, apologized for messing up.    Well, Google, please explain my scenario, because […]

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A belated thank-you to independent software creators

When I had to reinstall everything late last year, I didn’t thank the software developers for making it easy for me to get a new ID. I got personal replies from the programmers behind Barcode Maker 3 and SayNow, and found it relatively easy to sort out registration for FontLab and Gammadyne Mailer. The rest […]

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A way to delete your Google Wave account?

For those trying to leave Google Wave—and who have had no satisfaction whatsoever from the Google forums (what a surprise)—there might be one way.    There are quite a few reasons people want to leave Wave. One netizen had this concern: ‘It appears I have been linked to former associates who I have kept in […]

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