Thank you to VUW’s Alumni as Mentors programme

It’s not every day your Alma Mater gives you an award. I was very humbled to be recognized tonight by Victoria University of Wellington for my contribution to the Alumni as Mentors programme. The hard work is really the VUW team’s, who do such an amazing job matching us with students, and providing resources and […]

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I’ve seen that episode of Hustle

A young man who reminded me of a confidence trickster I knew (who is now serving time at His Majesty’s pleasure) approached me today on Lambton Quay. ‘I wonder if you could help me,’ he said. ‘I’ve just had my 25th birthday but woke up with all my stuff gone. I live in the Wairarapa […]

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The Lucire tribute to HM Queen Elizabeth II

I wrote the below in Lucire—even though plenty of publications have covered our monarch’s passing, it still felt right to acknowledge it. After all, she had appeared in Lucire a few times.   With the passing of HM Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday UK time, it would be remiss of this magazine to not mark […]

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On the mayoral races in Wellington and Toronto: Tory for us, not for them

Almost makes you want to run for mayor again. I had a look at my 2013 manifesto during the weekend and it wasn’t half bad. And, with respect to our candidates in Wellington, each of whom I know socially (and politics aside, actually like), it goes into more detail, and is arguably more visionary, than […]

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Laying out French articles in HTML takes a long time

Above: Some French text in Lucire.   Regular Lucire readers will have seen a number of articles run in English and French (and one in Japanese) on our main website. Typographically, the French ones are tricky, since we have to distinguish between non-breaking spaces and non-breaking thin spaces, and as far as I know, there […]

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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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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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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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Lucire’s holding page prior to launch

Of course I remember there was a holding page prior to Lucire launching on October 20, 1997 at 7 a.m. EST, or midnight NZDT on October 21, 1997. I just didn’t remember what it exactly looked like, till I discovered it at the Internet Archive:     There was no semicolon in JY&A Media, not […]

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