Thinking to the future as Lucire turns 15

21.10.2012/09.54

I’ve written so many editorials about Lucire’s history for our various anniversaries that now we’ve turned 15, I feel like I’d just be going over old ground. Again. I’d do it maybe for the 20th or 21st, but the story has been told online and in print many times. But 15 is a bit […]

Less Tumblring, less Facebooking—are email and blogging back?

03.01.2012/12.41

I’ve been noticing my Tumblr usage drop, and judging by the count here, my updates to this blog have fallen to a bit of a low this year. But, as Tumblr drops, this blog seems to be rising. I imagine 2012 will bring with it another change in how we all share our thoughts online. […]

Facebook Timeline gets rolled out: here come the complaints

16.12.2011/08.26

Above: My Facebook Timeline, as it appeared in October. As more of the planet gets on to Facebook Timeline, it’s been interesting to watch reactions. When Facebook went to a new layout three years ago, plenty of people—myself included—went to an anti-new Facebook group. Most were there because they didn’t like change, threatened to […]

Are you receiving me, over?

19.07.2011/06.18

I’m putting this out there in case others have experienced something similar: is the New Zealand internet constantly down? I’ve had the same email address since 1995. Yet, this year, a noticeable number of New Zealanders have telephoned here, saying that their messages have bounced. Even one team member has said that, if she […]

Fifty minutes to ﬁle a bug report at McAfee

16.06.2011/12.28

Being a helpful netizen costs too much sometimes. I found a very tiny bug in McAfee’s latest version. In Eudora, instead of ‘McAfee Anti-Spam’ in the menu bar, the latest update has caused those words to read ‘%COMPANY_NAME_NEUTRAL%Anti-Spam’. To be a helpful netizen ﬁling a bug report (and I am used to that […]

And now, another website that locks me out: TelstraClear

/01.04

Apologies to Daniel at TelstraClear for getting the full story detailed below, but if I don’t recount it, I’m going to continue getting the brick wall there. Essentially, the following email says, ‘Dear TelstraClear: please let me update my own tickets.’ Right now, and certainly since January, the company won’t let me. […]

Not all American hosting companies get it right

03.04.2011/22.37

While there was a British company that took months to respond to the equivalent of a DMCA complaint (under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act), generally American ﬁrms are very on the ball. There are exceptions. I won’t name this outﬁt but the weekend’s responses were laughable. March 21: Pirate puts up a copy […]

Autocade’s MediaWiki software gets locked down

05.03.2011/03.06

Autocade’s third birthday is on Tuesday, though today I had to introduce something that goes against the principles of MediaWiki: the prevention of public user registrations. Despite adding an Akismet anti-spam extension last week, spammers, evidently using non-blacklisted IPs, continued to add false content with their links on to the site today. I […]

Jack tries another Firefox beta—we all know what happens next

15.01.2011/06.39

Title says it all. Except this time, it’s not just the fonts. No link in a Google results page is clickable: in fact, Google hangs the entire browser (though I can still scroll up and down—yay). The program, after clicking on the close icon, stays in the Task Manager for at least 10 minutes (I […]

All I wanted to do was to say, ‘Thank you,’ to Telstra Clear

/01.48

I seem to be to computers what Frank Spencer is to life. Long-time readers will know that in 2009, Vox locked me out. We went round and round for months, with the company suggesting all sorts of solutions, usually putting the blame back on me or the ISP. I had tried logging in […]