Rotten sequel ideas, no. 1

01.06.2021/08.27

I’m not a comedian by any stretch of the imagination (neither are a lot of the people on comedy programmes here in Aotearoa) but every now and then my mind goes to funny places. Such as this: Since Coming 2 America was so uniformly awful (the best bits are in the trailer), this was […]

The colourless world

14.02.2021/10.48

This is a development proposed for my old street in Rongotai. Since I’ve moved away I haven’t a say in what happens there. I can only make some general remarks. And this post is not written from the Luddite position. It’s the price of progress that as cities grow, we need more housing, and […]

Facebook fooled us into thinking we were being creative

11.02.2021/02.48

My friend Keith has been away from Facebook for six weeks, for work reasons, and hasn’t missed it. And he asked, ‘Was it all really a waste of time?’ I know you think you know what I’m going to say, but the answer might surprise you a little. Fundamentally, it’s yes (this is […]

When fashion magazine websites begin looking the same

08.02.2021/11.09

Above: Vogue Korea’s website follows the æsthetic of a big lead image and smaller subsidiary ones. This started as a blog entry but took a tangent about 500 words in, and it was better as an op–ed in Lucire. Some of the themes will be familiar to regular readers, especially about Big Tech, but here […]

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 […]

Have we stopped innovating in online publishing?

22.07.2020/12.18

For a while, we’ve been thinking about how best to facelift the Lucire website templates, to bring them into the 2020s. The current look is many years old (I’ve a feeling it was 2016 when we last looked at it), which in internet terms puts this once-cutting edge site into old-school territory. But what’s […]

Google isn’t working

22.04.2020/08.33

I’ve done several Zoom meetings since the pandemic was declared, and two Google Hangouts. While I’m not thrilled at having to use two companies with patchy (to say the least) records on user privacy, the meetings (three for Medinge, one for another board I sit on) have been productive, and the only bottleneck has been, […]

Read More… from Google isn’t working

One more COVID-19 post: graphing and animating the data

06.04.2020/08.52

Russell Brown linked this COVID-19 trend page by Aatish Bhatia on his Twitter recently, and it’s another way to visualize the data. There are two axes: new confirmed cases (over the past week) on the y and total confirmed cases on the x. It’s very useful to see how countries are performing over time as […]

Z cars

11.03.2020/09.37

I did say I’d blog when Autocade hit 4,100 models, which it did yesterday. Proof that the hundredth milestones aren’t planned: the model was the Changan Zhixiang (長安志翔 or 长安志翔, depending on which script system you prefer) of 2008, a.k.a. Changan Z-Shine. A less than stellar car with a disappointingly assembled interior, but it did […]

One News is hard to miss on TV, but hidden on the internet

18.02.2020/08.39

I wanted to see what TV1 news (I can never remember its official name with all its rebrands over the years—is it One Network News, TVNZ1 News, One News, or something else?) had on GM’s decision to shut Holden, but I missed both the six o’clock and the Plus One screenings. I headed online with […]