Admittedly, it’s been difficult to figure out who to put a tick against for the Mayor vote for the Auckland Local Body elections. I’ve spent at least two hours in total reading about and researching all the candidates over the last week.
Some may argue that spending two hours is a total overkill, but admittedly, I do hold Civic responsibility quite seriously, and the fact that we do get to vote as part of a democratic nation is something I consider extremely important.
Resources reviewed and canvassed include…
The Voting instruction booklet / Candidate information. Same information is available on the Auckland Council Website. (Just click “+ More search options” then “Show mayoral candidates”)
The Candidates own resources, such as their own personal (campaign) website and social media accounts.
So far my research has come up rather inconclusive. The decision made more difficult is the candidate information appears to vary between mediums (i.e Candidate information booklet vs the Candidate’s website).
I’m still recovering from this dry cough / chest infection from a full blown flu earlier last month. Tried to go for a walk today primarily to start the process of getting my fitness back, but my lungs wouldn’t have a bar of it. Coughing fits like crazy as soon as an step up the intensity beyond a flat walk in the park.
Looks like I may have had a relapse last week, which hasn’t helped matters. (a 2nd bout, in spite of getting the flu shot this season)
Estimate time of recovery is next coming weekend. Then I need to blooming get my fitness back and see how much of it I loss over the month that I have been unwell.
Immune system wise, I seem to able be bash through bushes, get cut up everywhere, be leaking blood out from my limbs without knowing it and never have a problem. But in terms of respiratory ailments, my immune system is rather weak in that regard.
Update 7 December 2021: Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd (formerly Thrifty Car and Truck Rental Victoria now trading as SIXT Car Rental Vic & SA) have since kindly refunded me the admin fees earlier this year that were originally charged outside of the written agreement and which originally triggered off my indignation. Many of the fake reviews posted while they were trading as Thrifty have since been promptly deleted upon separately advising the matter had been turned over to the ACCC and Consumer Affairs Victoria for comment.
Had also fielded the occasional E-mail from those identifying themselves as past employees of Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd, describing Working Conditions, Pay and Internal Culture issues, etc. though these have since tailed off as Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd followed their franchisor to rebrand as SIXT Car Rental Australia.
It is however sincerely hoped that under their new banner as SIXT Australia, Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd will take this clean slate as an opportunity to continue to substantially improve on their business conduct and practices going forward.
Will leave this post up as is, as purely a historical snapshot / record of perhaps my single most unusual consumer experience I’ve ever had either side of the Tasman and the first and so far only time I’ve ever had to initiate formal action under any given country’s Consumer Protection Framework anywhere in the world. It should however be understood much of this post may no longer be current particularly the bit about planning to take them to VCAT upon my return visit to Australia.
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Topping off personally my single most disappointing consumer experience to date either side of the Tasman that I can recall… upon looking to place a review regarding my last hire experience with Thrifty Car Rental out of Mickelham Road, (Melbourne), discovered that the franchise owner along with certain senior staff of franchise operation Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd, had posted several of their own reviews whilst failing to disclose their commercial and/or employment connection to the business…
Lawrence (Vic.) Pty Ltd. T/A Thrifty Vic Car and Truck rental – Managing Director… “Personally I think that these guys are the best rental company in Victoria. They always have great service a delivery on time with a smile. I would recommend them to anybody.“
– Source: Google Maps (This has since been removed upon advising I had referred the matter to the ACCC and CAV)
Thrifty Franchise owner Lawrence (Vic.) Pty Ltd for Dandenong, posting a 5 star review of his own business. This has since been removed.
…Being the owner, of course he would think and say that about his own business. Some disclosure in his review would have been nice.
Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd’s Chief Financial Officer, was also discovered to have placed multiple 5 star ratings of a number of Thrifty Car and Truck rental locations…
Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd’s Chief Financial Officer posting 5 star ratings for the branches owned by his employer in breach of ACCC Guidelines. (They were formerly operating as Thrifty, now operating as SIXT Car and Truck Rental Australia.)
Some more ratings placed by the same individual. He has placed 5 star ratings on at least 8 (possibly more) locations owned by Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd along with 5 star ratings for a handful of other Thrifty Locations owned by other business units.
Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd’s Chief Financial Officer posting 5 star ratings for the branches owned by his employer in breach of ACCC Guidelines. (They were formerly operating as Thrifty, now operating as SIXT Car and Truck Rental Australia.)
Also came across this… Known employees (confirmed upon glancing at their profiles) including the owner of Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd are seen posting fake ratings and reviews for Thrifty Vehicle Sales location (Since renamed simply to “Direct Vehicle Warehouse” as of December 2021) that they operate in Dandenong. (These have since been removed in haste upon advising I have turned the matter over to the ACCC and Consumer Affairs Victoria)
Fake Reviews posted to the Thrifty Vehicle Sales page in Dandenong (Since renamed “Direct Vehicle Warehouse” as of 2021) by those in the employ of the reviewed business (Lawrence Vic Pty ltd). These have now been removed after advising I had referred the matter to the ACCC and CAV
Furthermore, if you glance at the rest of the profiles from where the ratings and reviews have come from, quite a few of them I feel appeared (at least to me) to be from direct friends to one of the Staff in question (Profiles liking and commenting on posts from the staffer’s profile and vice versa or more apparent, the staffer appearing on the friends widget of those profiles).
While friends of staff are well within their right to place a review if they are genuine customers, a potential conflict of interestis present and this should really be disclosed within any review they post as per the ACCC Guidelines in respect to asking friends to leave a review.
More Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd staff posting positive reviews, this time for Thrifty Weipa. (While this may be a different business unit to Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd, they are still part of the Australian Thrifty Car Rental network and any such review should disclose this)
Thrifty Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd employees posting reviews for Thrifty Weipa. While a different Franchise, they are still part of the same network and should be disclosed.
An older review from 3 years ago posted by another employee of Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd…
Another Google self review from a Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd staffer for Thrifty Car and Truck Rental Campbellfield.
Here’s a more recent glowing review for Thrifty Car and Truck Rental for Footscray…
(the statement “…team that works together to achieve their goals” caught my eye as it’s not normally something posted by a genuine customer)
(The review below was quickly removed after I posted a temporary review publicly challenging it)
Glowing review of Footscray Thrifty Car and Truck Rental posted by a staff member of Thrifty Footscray. This was quickly removed after posting my own review to challenge it.
From then I looked at the reviewer’s other review for Coles Express, a service station very close by Thrifty Car and Truck Rental Footscray where he mentions “…as part of my job for a rental car company…”
Same employee mentioning he worked for a car rental firm. No surprises which one.
…All the above fake reviews were the ones that were known about and could be directly linked to Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd personnel.
The last fake testimonial above was only caught by virtue that the staff member in question had posted in another review mentioning he worked for a rental car company.
In my mind, it certainly raises the question… How many of the other customer testimonials could also be fake or otherwise have been posted by Thrifty Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd personnel?
Wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd management possibly encouraged their employees to engage in the practice particularly since the owner himself was seen placing at least a couple of his own fake reviews.
Reviews posted to Lawrence Vic Pty ltd. New location: Thrifty Coburg in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. While an individual review from a profile where this is their only review is not sufficient by itself to raise a red flag, the ratio of such reviews do raise a red flag with me.
Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd’s newer location, Thrifty Coburg, Melbourne, Victoria. 4 out of 6 reviews revealed anomalies. 3 out of 6 reviews were posted by people with only 1 review with a 4th review from below…
The reason why this looks fishy…
The ratio. Out of 6 total reviews, 3 were made by reviewers with only 1 review,
One of them being especially and suspiciously hyperbolic. “Wow, what an experience” is a sizable red flag to me as such reviews have in the past often been found to be fake upon my own investigation. How often would one be so over the moon renting from a car hire place?
A 4th review was made by a reviewer who has a total of 5 Google reviews to her name. However, out of those 5 reviews, 4 of them are for Thrifty locations all operated by Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd, another red flag…
This reviewer has a total of 5 Google reviews to their name. 4 of them for Thrifty locations, all operated by Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd. I suspect this is more than a coincidence.
There are a few further individuals who if you Google their name present results to their LinkedIn profiles indicating they work for Thrifty. Whether they are the same people who posted these (in my view) rather anomalous, “written like an advert” review for Thrifty Vehicle Sales Dandenong is not able to be definitively confirmed as there are a ton of People in the Melbourne Area with the same (first and last) names, Never the less, the prose is very unlike a customer would normally write and combined with a match to Linkedin, these reviews I feel should be viewed with a high degree of skepticism.
While I acknowledge that Lawrence Vic Pty ltd isn’t alone in such antics (Far from it), Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd is the first business (that isn’t an outright cold calling boiler room “wire” scam operation) who I have both personally had any sort of interaction with and seen engaging in the posting of falsified testimonials.
Overall my hire experience with Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd was far removed from my usually smooth hire experience under the Thrifty brand in Australia. I will admit to letting my guard down in this instance due to trust built up from multiple positive hiring experiences before hand under the Thrifty brand. Issues with the Lawrence Franchise include…
Failure to disclose upfront the full fee structure in their written legal documentation in respect to minor damage caused by a small Roo jumping into the side of the vehicle. An undisclosed and non-specific 3.5% Administrative fee was levied on top of other Administrative fees and was not disclosed to me verbally nor in writing. (I understand as of September 2020, Thrifty Australia have now rewritten their Terms and Conditions to better disclose this to cover their network of outlets and franchises, however, was not disclosed as per their terms and conditions as of 2018 at the time of the hire) Note March 2021: Have since had a large portion of that refunded back to me.
Upon contacting the Licensee’s HQ at Dandenong thinking that these matters would be easy to clarify, I was instead met with a defensive attitude from one of their accountants (who I now learn has since left the organization) with the chain of communication abruptly closing at “Thanks for your feedback on our disclosure” with no further attempt by Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd to explain or otherwise point out where in the written agreement these charges applied.
Failure to provide a copy of the agreement at initiation of the hire requiring several follow ups. (This doesn’t appear to be an isolated incident with Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd.)
Upon eventual receipt of the above, discovered a break down add on I never requested and which I strongly believe was snuck on by the RSO under IMO obvious pressure by his bosses to meet his monthly sales target. The RSO agent I strongly believe drew my attention away from it during the walk through of the said agreement. I will take this on the chin this time, but this is something that prospective hirer’s must watch out for. Don’t be too trusting in “the brand”. Renting from one Thrifty branch (in my case, several different Thrifty branches) does not mean they do things the same way as any other Thrifty branch.
The vehicle, A Hyundai Accent hatch ran rather poorly compared to the same Make/model I rented several times from other Thrifty branches in Australia and New Zealand. The service sticker also indicated the vehicle was 2 months over due for it’s service. Anecdotes from Employees and Fellow customers a like indicate that they regularly cut corners on servicing.
On presenting a New Zealand Driver’s license, Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd demanded 2 x Australian Phone numbers and an Australian Address. No where was this stated anywhere on booking nor the unified thrifty.com.au Website. This is different from Thrifty Melbourne Airport and Thrifty Melbourne city (Spencer st) where no such requirement exists.
Their employment ads suggest a rather Sales driven culture I feel (“…totally focused on achieving targets and budgets”) and this has been emphasized in Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd’s ads far more than for Front line roles advertised by other Vehicle Rental agencies (operating under the Thrifty banner or otherwise) I feel.
I have also since dropped a note to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) and Consumer Affairs Victoria (CAV) to let them know of Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd’s conduct.
If would be fair to say that I hold the management of Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd personally responsible for the matters arising out of my hire with them. Nor have I ruled out possibly taking out a case against Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) when I’m next back over the ditch on business.
To date, this remains by far and away my single most acrimonious experience as a customer to any business either side of the Tasman. I would expect to see these sorts of business antics 20 years ago in Mainland China (when things there were less developed) and not in a country such as Australia.
While I have since continued to rent through other ‘Thrifty’ branded business units in Australia without experiencing anywhere near the same sorts of issues, my continued custom with Thrifty as a brand is now under review (particularly so now that NZ AA and Thrifty Australia between them seems to have ended the hire car deals for us NZ AA Members).
In a nutshell… I consider trust extremely important in any transaction I undertake and Lawrence Vic Pty Ltd through their conduct I feel have completely failed to demonstrate this.
(This post is a sort of a lead in from my previous post about Meetup.com)
Anecdotally, it seems the majority of groups which have left the Meetup.com platform have moved their group to Facebook. Branding I’ve come to realize is at play here with Facebook’s seemingly relentless march to take control as much of the web as humanely possible.
While I’ve found many people announce that they “Hate” Facebook saying it’s crap, to them, it’s a familiar sort of ‘Crap’, people subconsciously lean to Familiar because Familiar is “Safe”. Another words… “Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don’t”.
Like ‘McDonalds’ is to fast food, People may criticize their food as ‘plastic’, but yet keep coming back to it because there is some psychological guarantee that it will be the same ‘Plastic’ food they they know of. Take this, if you landed in a new country, would you try some unfamiliar food outlet selling unfamiliar food or head straight towards the Big illuminated ‘M’? This is something that came to my mind when I was setting up a Test Instance of Oxwall and is something us Decentralization / Open web advocates are going to need to consider.
Attended the Flight Centre Travel Expo briefly in the morning just to have a quick look. While it perhaps didn’t really inspire me to go traveling more than I currently do, it did put in perspective just how much people were willing to pay for convenience by buying a pre-arranged tour, even with the 15% Flight Centre Expo discount applied. Seems 180-450 per day per person is the norm and that is excluding flights.
Inside a Tour coach (Flight Centre Travel Expo)
While people will no doubt have differing views, based on one’s circumstances (You’re time poor, you have a family to look after, etc). I feel that planning a holiday yourself and researching in detail where to go, what to do, etc,is a large part of the Holiday experience.
I think it was the same deal with my Victoria, Australia trip to both the Grampians [Photos] and 12 Apostles [Photos]. Looked at tours available then in the end, decided to book a rental car myself and book accommodation myself for a much cheaper overall rate.
For those in a position to do so, self arranged holidays provided some advantages…
Not being rushed and hearded around. Take it at your leisure. Increased chances for better photo opportunities.
More flexibility to see what you want, do want you want.
Even for a solo traveler, booking your own transport and accommodation worked out cheaper than taking a pre-packaged tour.
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Indeed, I personally knew the guy behind Ronovationz… but that was 10 or so years ago. Please don’t go asking me about him and his recently exposed behaviour in the media.
In context, it looks like he pushed it a little bit too far over the edge, particularly considering given the climate of housing unaffordability issues which really are a political hot potato at the moment. (There is no two ways about it, Australasian property prices in the main centres are way out of line relative to things globally… being other real estate markets in the world, and relative to other economic factors)
The fact that “Every investor does it”, doesn’t make it right as such.
Did some very superficial improvements to eek out a few microseconds for KAHA .
Decided to kill off a few install scripts, mostly examples / evaluation prototypes from the “Forum Feasibility Project” and this seems to have lightened the load a minuscule. Performance speed of this site fails due to having not many of the usual server side optimizations in place (G Zip compression), also haven’t bothered to make much use of many if any Contend Distribution Networks (CDNs).
Regarding “Time to First Byte” (TTFB), running to about 2-8 seconds. Not quite sure what’s up with that, seems even a static html test page will take a long time for the server to start serving it up. After the tweaks, it still hasn’t improved… Seems to be quite stubborn. Disabling plugins seem to reduce the TTFB by about 20%, but still not as much as I would like.
Have since found the impacting factor is actually SSL. Turn that off and make everything just regular HTTP as opposed to HTTPS, the TTFB reduces to nothing. Re-enable SSL and it jumps back up to a few seconds.
NUI.NZ will always be slow(er). It’s practically a photo gallery.
I’ve Been on the look out for a better camera to replace my Olympus TG-3 with it’s small sensor and in confession, rather frustratingly excessively heavy noise reduction (that you can’t disable)… something that is weather proof, can fit in my pocket, has a 1 inch sensor, acceptable low light performance, and has zoom.
After much searching, the conclusion that I’ve come to is that in the digital compact point and shoot camera market has almost completely stalled. Neither Olympus, Sony, Panasonic haven’t updated their Waterproof Camera line for something like 2-3 years, with the actual hardware itself hardly having shifted for the last perhaps five years (later models it seems simply predominantly had firmware updates and then sold as a new camera)
It appears Smart phones are eating up the space that was formerly occupied by compact point and shoot cameras. The problem this presents is that the middle ground between commoners who simply take photos for social media and more professional consumers is sorely uncatered for.
Phone Cameras I feel are still lacking in the image quality department, while the likes of Samsung have done quite well, the others haven’t done so well. Additionally, They still lack optical zoom.
I’ve tried lugging around a DSLR, it just doesn’t work (for me), the case is too large and is always bouncing around against my body.
At the same time, the water proof compacts (the segment I’m looking at) seem to still be bundled with small sensors (unchanged from 5 years ago), rather over aggressive noise reduction you can’t turn off, and pictures that look all smudge except in the brightest of sunny days… Zoom in to this example here – and you will see what I mean
At the moment, In the absence of anything more suited to my present situation, will retain the TG-3, however, the camera is now well over 2 years old, has taken the best part of perhaps 30,000 snaps, and is already faulting out (Unable to Focus until power cycled / Crashes) on an increasingly regular basis, so am keen to find a possible replacement soon before it finally gives up the ghost completely.
Update 4th January 2017 – Happy to announce that the “mega rage face” status can now be retracted. The weather on the trip turned out to be kind enough to open up a few hours after arriving at Okaka hut, rewarding our climb with views including a spectacular sunset on top of Humpridge Track. Thankfully the Computer modeled weather forecasts did not eventuate in their entirety!
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Yargh… Earlier in the week, saw the Tuesday 27th forecast appear around the corner and thought hopefully that it will go away. Looking again today and much to my chagrin, I get presented with this…
It would be perhaps fair to remark “It probably doesn’t get much worse than this”. (if weather conditions got worse, the operator would likely cancel the trip, refund us the monies and we go on our merry way to do something else)
Will pack my blue raincoat (the Swazi one) which seems to have an interesting ability to repel Rainy weather /s (as well as the regular poncho)
Rain itself I don’t mind (being rain falling on me), but simply going down there and climbing up 900m to simply see solid white / grey will likely drive me silently bonkers as it did when I did Waikaremoana and walked up the bluff only to see Stark White.
Yeah, If weather turns out to be shite and all I get is solid gray to see, I fully intend to go back down again at some later date (i.e before Christmas next year) and take up the chopper option up to the top, walk down and and do the River to Lake Jet boat (if they offer that activity combination as an option).
I’ve already forfeited my Farm Stay / Hunting Trip invite (from another circle of good friends) to attend the Humpty walk and it would be extremely disrespectful to fellow group companions to pull out. Here’s hoping that the computer modeled forecasts are wrong.
More Mobile Friendly. Pictures can be made to display at Maximum Screen extents, better utilizing the real estate of a small screen. The older carousel had some challenges where by the picture would appear very small.
Support for zooming in on both Mobile Devices and Desktop. Users Can now pinch zoom natively. (Using one of their pay plugins)
Browser Back Button behaviour is more intuitive. In the old Carousel, once you finished sliding through all the pictures, closed the carousel light box, and hit the back button (to go back to the front page / album listing), it would instead relaunch the carousel and show you the last picture. Continue hitting the back button, it would go back through the photos you had just viewed (in reverse). The dFactory lightbox eliminates this (at least on most browsers I’ve tested this plugin with)
So far, everything appears to be working pretty well. Will probably deactivate and remove jetpack in due course. Jetpack (as a whole) is good for certain sites, though probably too fully featured and some components of it too heavy for personal homepages like this one, I feel.
History of these domain names (being both peak.nz and nui.nz) is that they were acquired for a personal project to create an online space (Forum, private social network, or other web CMS) for organizing outings and events informally and casually between a small group of friends away from relying on Centralized and Commercialized Networks such as Facebook and Meetup
Part of the prescription was that this new “space” had to be accessible via Mobile, the domain names needed to be easily typed in to a mobile device and in this case, shorter the better. Appears with the .nz domains names not being as recognisable or respected as the .co.nz ones, both of the aforementioned domain names were freely available for registration at the time (and had been for several months after the DNC Preferential Rights of Registration period had ended),
However, the project, apart from setting up multiple props for evaluation, in effect never took off and it was at this stage, the allure of facebook was found / assessed to be nigh impossible to break for the social circle that it was intended for (the same social circle, which originally suggested creating an alternative), and I have since decided to pick up and use these domains myself for my own personal use.
Have since made the Forums to display better on Mobile devices (The original CSS / Styling that came with the plug-in wasn’t at all Mobile friendly, it’s now at least semi-acceptable)
Post anything you want. (Except spam and scams of course.)
If there is enough interest, I can look to deploy a fully fledged Discourse forum
Embedded IRC Chat Test. This is what I believe is Old school Group Chat, effectively the predecessor to the Facebook Messenger Group chats. Click “More” to reveal the Interface.
If you live in the UK and your name is “Fergus Young” and you have shopped at Topman Recently and / or you attend(ed) Strodes College , could you please ensure the businesses / organizations you deal with have your correct Email address. At the moment, I’ve suddenly been receiving a deluge of email in my Gmail account clearly intended for someone else (whom happens to have the same name as me) from Shopping Mailers, shopping receipts, Doctors Emails, Appointment Reminder Emails, Emails from Lecturers from various UK Educational institutions.
Chances are, it’s probably an assortment of email intended for more than one other “Fergus Young” after all, there were at last count, 7 different Facebook accounts for “Fergus Young”, (BTW, none of which are mine because I don’t have a Facebook profile… at least not on the main facebook site)
While I have been advising these organizations of the error (in the hope they will inform the intended Fergus Young to verify their correct email address) and then dutifully deleting such email. The message often does not get through successfully and misdirected emails usually continue until the Person for which the email is intended for discovers that they aren’t receiving email they believe they should.
Usually it’s a matter of people registering with Google Mail with a middle initial and then forgetting to include the middle initial when giving out their email address (e.g fergus.j.young instead of fergus.young or similar) or the businesses whom they give it to entering it incorrectly in to their systems.
