Bruce Clement

US Medical Insurance

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +1300

In most of the third world, you can only get good medical care if you can afford it, and for most people it isn't an option. When Tessa and I were touring India a few years back, she had a cold that was turning into bronchitis, we were rich tourists by local standards and had medical insurance but for reasons that really aren't worth dwelling on at length the only doctor I could get Tessa to was a night clinic in the shops by our hotel. The Dr there charged us Rs 50/- (About 2 NZ $) for the consultation and a course of medicine cost another Rs 100/- for us a trivial amount, but for the average Indian manual worker at least 2 days pay. In retrospect we think we probably stumbled across a charity clinic and if our $6 helped provide a doctors visit for a couple of locals then I don't mind. I ...

Source: US Medical Insurance

High Ranking Sites Directory

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +1300

I've long had a few general and a couple of special purpose reciprocal web directories. I started with Search New Zealand, then added Search Me NZ and Weblinks, Weblinks was originally a restructured Search New Zealand that was intended to replace the original and Search Me was an experiment to see if formatting, web thumbs etc. would make a difference (the answer was yes, and the result was negative). In the end each directory acquired a life of its own and now exists as a resource in its own right.

Inspired by the success of the other directories I crea ...

Source: High Ranking Sites Directory

Musings on change

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +1300

On Saturday Tessa and I went up to the top of Mt Albert and looked across to what had once been my teenage home, just as I had stood there and looked across a many times when I was a teenager in the 1970s, before I moved away from first home, then Auckland and now back. The trees are taller and it is harder to pick out the house among the trees, but the mountain is the same and in many ways the house. All around there is change, the new motorway, changed buildings, but the basic layout of the roads is unchanged and so is the geography.

Businesses aren't like that, many of the iconic businesses of my youth and early adulthood are still around but merged or changed beyond recognition. I have a life i ...

Source: Musings on change

Valuing A Revenue Producing Domain Name

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

This is a response I gave on the Namepros forum to the question "I have a portfolio of parked domains making 10K per year, what should I sell them for"

The value of your portfolio depends on who you are selling it to. If it's an experienced investor in parked domains they should have their own view of what multiplier of the revenue they are prepared to pay.

If it's to someone that wants the name or its traffic for some other purpose they may have a different view of the value of the domain to them.

When I'm offering to sell a domain with good revenue to a non-domainer I explain the site's current traffic profile and the revenue it's generating me. The ...

Source: Valuing A Revenue Producing Domain Name

Internationalised Domain Names

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Domain names are human readable names such as Example.com that people can use to find web sites. When first defined, domain names could contain only the ASCII letters A-Z, numbers 0-9 and the hyphen (-).

These characters are all that English requires to create meaningful names, and served for the early days on the Internet, but since the Internet has gone international, native speakers of other languages that require different characters for intelligibility have become major users of the internet. This restriction on internet domain names has disadvantaged them.

For example, the content of NewZealand.com is pretty obvious to any English speaker, but to Chinese speakers it may be completely unintelligible and they would be more likely to look for the same information on ???.cn

...

Source: Internationalised Domain Names

Negotiation, more than just haggling

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

About a year ago I received a simple inquiry through NameDrive on one of my parked generic domain names. "Are you interested in selling this domain name? If so can you please contact me" giving an ISP customer email address. That's very little information and as email is fairly inscrutable at the best of times, I didn't have an idea why this person would be interested in this domain name, so I knew I'd be negotiating blind.

I am contacted by a lot of people who believe I should sell them my generic names for nothing and unless there's some identifiable reason why the prospect desperately wants a specific domain name, queries as bare as this stop as soon as I quote a realistic starting price, so I ...

Source: Negotiation, more than just haggling

What is Domain Parking?

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

In its simplest form domain parking is a service where someone owns a domain name and another person or company provides a very simple website for that domain. Some domain registrars automatically park domains that their owners don't host elsewhere on a simple page they construct on their servers.

In the early days that's all parking was. Then an entrepreneur realised that there were a lot of page views going to waste on these empty sites. The world of commerce hates wasting resources and before long

Source: What is Domain Parking?

Viral marketing of Open Source Software

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

When plain text isn't enough we often need to use Microsoft formats because so many people can read them on their computers. We can't use other formats because only a few people have the software to read them.

So, let those of us who don't like this change it. It isn't going to happen overnight, but over time it can happen. I'm not going to argue why we should wish to do this, that's a whole other article, this intel is written to help those who already want to promote Open Source Software (OSS).

I use Open Office.org as my example as it is a standards compliant, cross platform, office suite that many people who are not open source advocates choose to use. The same technique would work for many other open source products, once they have reached a moderate level of acce ...

Source: Viral marketing of Open Source Software

Meat does more for climate change than food miles

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

With all the recent concern about fuel miles affecting New Zealand's meat exports to Europe by causing people to avoid buying it I was fascinated when I found this interesting report in the environment area of New Scientist

Source: Meat does more for climate change than food miles

Beware the Free DNS

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300

When people first start publishing on the internet they often start by creating content on free services like Geocities or Blogspot. After a while they decide they need their own domain name to help separate their content from the other denizens of the free host.

Source: Beware the Free DNS

Teen uses microbes to biodegrade plastic bags

Fri, 31 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Polyethylene bags are an environmental curse because they are expected to take thousands of years to decompose, and worldwide their use is growing.

In India, for example, over the last 15 years plastic bags have taken over from traditional, biodegradable or recyclable wrappings and when I visited there recently I was appalled by how much the urban landscape was spoiled by discarded bags caught in fences, railings, hedges, trees or just lying on the ground.

The Record recently reported that Canadian high school student Daniel Burd from in Warterloo, Ontario, developed a process for breaking down plastic bags and demonstrated it at a school science fair.

Burd reasoned that slow as the process was, ...

Source: Teen uses microbes to biodegrade plastic bags

Pacific Island Pigs

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

The pig followed human colonization of the pacific, so why did it get to the Polynesian islands, but miss out on reaching New Zealand until European contact? Or did it?

I got alerted to this through a web search turning up a paper from 2001 by Melinda S. Allen, Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith and Ann Horsburgh, researchers at Auckland University, who became interested as an outgrowth of the genetic work of Matisoo-Smith and colleagues on the ancestry and historic dispersal of the kiore (Polynesian rat).

Their paper begins "Pig was one of three ...

Source: Pacific Island Pigs

Truth: Pravda Lives

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

Remember Pravda, the newspaper of the Communist Party of The USSR? Despite its name meaning "Truth", for nearly eighty years years it was the boring parrot of whatever its totalitarian masters wanted it to say no matter how remote from truth that was.

Somehow it survived the break-up of the Soviet Union, although it did split between the hard-line communists who now run the paper edition of the newspaper and a more pro-Russian faction that created the Pravda.ru news service.

Pravda.ru is now a tabloid website that contains Google ads and other signs of on-line capitalism, and recently published an article on a group of Americans who met for a weekend of Truth: Pravda Lives

Auckland, New Zealand, Daily Photo Blog

Sat, 25 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

When you live in a country known for its natural beauty and pastoral countryside, it can be hard sometimes to appreciate the beauty of the urban landscape where most of us actually live.

For about 6 months I've been visiting an amazing photoblog called Auckland Daily Photo by a Lachezar Karadzhov about whom I know absolutely nothing except he takes some amazing photographs. According to the site he was a finalist in the Best Oceanian Photoblogs 2007 competition for his Lachezar's photo_notes site, and I find this easy to believe.

With a name like Auckland Daily Photo the content should be fairly obvious although he does sometimes include photos from other parts of the country ...

Source: Auckland, New Zealand, Daily Photo Blog

Faster short distance commuting by scooter

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300

A few years back I used to commute to work from Massey on a bus that ended up at the Britomart interchange which is about 2.5 km from the office in Parnell.

With my version of power walking I could cover the 2.5km in about 20 minutes, but I wanted something faster, and I didn't want to arrive at work covered in sweat so I took it a little slower.

There were buses I could catch to get to work but they didn't connect and were slow and erratic in rush hour traffic. What's worse they still only got me to about 800 metres from work.

My solution was to get a child's folding scooter, like the ones that were all the rage with the little ones a few years back, admittedly a sturdier than normal one with large wheels.

On flat ground you can move at about two to three times the speed ...

Source: Faster short distance commuting by scooter