I relayed this to one of my editors after recalling an old colleague we used to work with. He was kind enough to put me up once, pre-9-11, when I was on the US east coast. I was meant to stay with him for a few days and work on some stories together. I envisaged […]
Tag: 2000s
Go for it, Harry
Say what you will about Prince Harry making millions from his book and TV appearances. What if it’s to help fund the destruction of one Keith Rupert Murdoch and News Corp., and save the very fabric of democracy itself in the UK? It’s not going to be cheap, but the dude is out for blood. […]
Ford means nothing at all
I followed a Ford Ranger today and felt nothing. This isn’t as strange as it sounds. Ford has become a truck company here, too, and there’s nothing about the blue oval that stirs the soul any more. Mustangs are rare, and Ford—which once democratized flash—doesn’t have the brand equity that it used to. Never mind […]
The original (and shortest-lived) look to this website in 2002
When I said this was the third template for this site yesterday, I was wrong. There was one more at the very start, thanks to the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, making 2023’s new look the fourth. In September 2002, very soon after I acquired the jackyan.com domain around the time of my 30th […]
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The newer the tech, the slower the site
So far I’ve had two people feed back about the site redesign and it’s positive. One friend in the US noticed that the site ran slower for him than before, which is very astute of him: he’s absolutely right because it seems the newer the tech, the slower things go. Bit like banking. I’ve had […]
Of course Bing AI makes stuff up—Bing itself does
Of course some of us expected Microsoft Bing and ChatGPT to be rubbish—and we knew ChatGPT would make stuff up. Because Bing makes stuff up. If you have a normal, functioning web crawler (or spider), there’s no way you would ever wind up with pages that have never existed. Nothing about this is […]
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Being transparent: you might as well know what you’re going to click on
This may be wise, or it may not be. I thought netizens would want to know if a page was ancient, and since Google keeps putting really old stuff that hasn’t been linked for nearly 20 years into the top 10 for a site:lucire.com search, I may as well let readers know what they’re going […]
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Nice try, Marissa Mayer, but no conversion
I had a chuckle at Marissa Mayer saying that Google results are worse because the web is worse. As I’ve shown with a site:lucire.com search, which is a good one since our site pre-dates Google (just), Google is less capable of providing the relevant pages for a typical search. I know how web spiders work […]
Now Google is worsening on a site: search: framesets from the early 2000s are in the top 10
This was never supposed to become a search engine blog, but like the Facebook “malware scanner” (or was that scammer?) and Google lying about its Ads Preferences Manager, I was forced to investigate when no one in the media (or, for that matter, the wider internet) did. And over the years, those posts really helped […]
The expectation of invisibility
I rewatched Princess of Chaos, the TV drama centred around my friend, Bevan Chuang. I’m proud to have stood by her at the time, because, well, that’s what you do for your friends. I’m not here to revisit any of the happenings that the TV movie deals with—Bevan says it brings her closure so that […]