Wellington, the mayoralty and local politics.
The late 1990s were a heady time here in Aotearoa. The web—pre-Google, pre-monopolies—was indeed the great leveller: anyone with the right skills could create something online that competed at a global level. Aotearoa, which had for years felt a little backward in time—TV shows would arrive here two to three years after they aired in […]
Read More… from For the sake of our city, it’s important to take the opportunities to move forward
I like technology. I don’t hate technology. But I hate what a bunch of idiots have done with technology. You’d be forgiven for thinking I was referring to the mass misinformation-authoring that used my name over the last three months, but, frankly, this level of technological misuse is everywhere in various forms. Take today, when […]
Read More… from To those who take technology and make life harder: you’re doing it wrong
Medium, which has been great at removing misinformation about me, rightly asked (after removing yet another fake story about me), ‘Why are they using your name? What are they gaining?’ I replied: Thank you, and I’m glad you’ve asked. I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of this for a while, ever since these […]
Read More… from What do the authors of misinformation have to gain?
The latest model on Autocade: the second-generation Ssangyong Rexton, now the KG Rexton. Last week, Autocade hit its 16th anniversary, and how different this one looks from the last. Now there’s a print counterpart, and some very nice readers have offered their reviews, too. We’re nearing 5,000 models on there, and the last several […]
A seven-year-old needs to figure this out: what would the Ford Escort Popular Plus be priced at if were assembled in Aotearoa? Amanda and I were chatting about prodigies. Some young people are amazing, doing uni classes at intermediate or high-school age, or playing piano like Mozart, and while not all of us have […]
Read More… from You never know where your interests will take you
We need to change our habits slightly with the new pay-by-plate meters in Wellington City, as I discovered. If I arrive in town for, say, two 90-minute meetings with, say, 15 minutes between them, what I might do after the first is to move my car. I might also put a bit of extra money […]
Read More… from We need to serve the technology with the new pay-by-plate meters
First up, as I’ve publicly posted this and have helped out myself, my friend and colleague Hasan Abu Afash is in Palestine, and I don’t need to tell you what he and his people are facing. If you can help out, here’s a link to his Paypal. Apparently, August 11, 2023 marked my 20 […]
[Cross-posted from Lucire] Lucire will get a sister title in print. As the only magazine from New Zealand that’s licensed internationally—as far as I know—we could do one of two things: not pursue new titles because no one else does this work in this country, or expand our horizons further because no one else […]
A friend in the UK recently told me: I read how companies say they cannot find anyone to fill their roles, and I have a bunch of very talented, highly qualified friends who are out of work who can’t find anything. Having looked into this locally, it’s far from being a strictly UK problem. I […]
Read More… from Most of HR isn’t about finding the right candidate
There’s no big secret that I changed high schools, from one where the experience was less than stellar to Scots College, where I felt like I fitted perfectly. During my second mayoral campaign, an old boy of the first place, Rongotai College, wrote to me via my feedback form sitting on his high horse, wondering […]
Read More… from Being part of the problem, but not seeing it