Browser history

11.04.2022/01.53

In 2011, I was definitely on Firefox. I believe I started browsing as many did, with Netscape. But not 1.0 (though I had seen copies at university). I was lucky enough to have 1.1 installed first. I stuck with Netscape till 4.7. Its successor, v. 6, was bloated, and never worked well on my […]

Hopefully this week: farewell, Amazon Web Services

10.04.2022/12.37

Wow, we’re nearly there: the long journey to migrate our sites off AWS and on to a new box. We began hosting there in 2012 but the server—which appears to have had a single major update in 2016—was getting very old. In 2018 we began searching for someone who knew about migrations. A second […]

A dodgy 2000s’ UK spam list is still doing the rounds in 2022, pretending to be legit

07.04.2022/13.11

During February, I received spam from Novuna in the UK, the finance company that’s a subsidiary of Mitsubishi. It wasn’t personally addressed, it was just a general message. I complained via their complaints’ email, only to have the message bounce back as it wasn’t working. However, they did respond on Twitter, unlike less caring […]

Facelifting the Lucire licensing site after 13 years

30.06.2021/03.26

After 13 years, it was time to facelift the Lucire licensing website. It’s a very familiar template, similar to what we used for JY&A Consulting a few months back. The home page copy we already had from a flier that we created late last year that Susan Ninan and I worked on; and the […]

Finished replying to my 2005 and 2006 emails

07.06.2021/02.12

I’m not exactly proud of this, but last month I finished replying to all my emails from 2005. That year I was stuck in Auckland for an extra day due to the airport there being fogged in. I said to another traveller, ‘Well, I won’t catch up on emails now till the end of […]

On OneDrive, Flickr, and FLOC

19.05.2021/10.51

Yesterday, I worked remotely, and I don’t know what possessed me, but as OneDrive was activated on my laptop, I decided to save a word processing file there, planning to grab it from my desktop machine later in the day. Normally I would just leave the file where it was and transfer it across the […]

Branding ourselves in the 2020s: a revamp for JY&A Consulting’s website, jya.co

05.02.2021/00.19

Last night, I uploaded a revised website for JY&A Consulting (jya.co), which I wrote and coded. Amanda came up with a lot of the good ideas for it—it was important to get her feedback precisely because she isn’t in the industry, and I could then include people who might be looking to start a new […]

This was the natural outcome of greed, in the forms of monopoly power and sensationalist media

11.01.2021/23.58

I did indeed write in the wake of January 6, and the lengthy op–ed appears in Lucire, quoting Emily Ratajkowski, Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden. I didn’t take any pleasure in what happened Stateside and Ratajkowski actually inspired the post after a Twitter contact of mine quoted her. This was after President Donald Trump was […]

Was it six networks or only five? In all this excitement, they’re ‘Still the One’

23.10.2020/12.52

I’m sure there are many, many more examples of this tune being used to promote TV networks, but it seems to be a standard in at least three countries I know, and probably far more besides. It is, of course, ‘Still the One’, which ABC used in the US to celebrate being the top-rated […]

You can’t bank on the Wales (or, why I closed our Westpac account)

31.07.2020/03.59

At some point as a young man, my Dad worked at a bank. He had a formal understanding of finance—despite his schooling being interrupted by the Sino–Japanese War and then by the communist revolution, he managed to get himself a qualification in economics, and had some time working for a bank. I was taught […]