Month: October 2010

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, for those who haven’t been paying attention properly. Once more I’ve skipped a week, but I haven’t been all that prolific so I’ll think you’ll cope.

Articles

• Coalition objection to NBN opt-out is just scaremongering, for Crikey. Debunking some of the not-quite-totally-accurate statements that Opposition communications spokesperson Malcolm Turnbull is making about the National Broadband Network.

Podcasts

• Patch Monday episode 60, “Credit cards risked by standards failure”. My guest is Mark Goudie, head of the forensics practice for Verizon Business in Melbourne. I also chat with journalist and telco analyst Richard Chirgwin about the NBN opt-out issue.

Media Appearances

• While it’s not strictly “media”, the panel No Man’s Land at the National Young Writers Festival the other weekend went remarkably well. I did make a crappy phone-quality recording of the session, and if that can be turned into a podcast I will do so. Eventually.

Geekery

• I finally completed the migration of all my Prussia.Net internet hosting clients to a new server. For those who care about such things, it’s a leased dedicated server at ServePath running CentOS and the cPanel/WHM hosting control panel. I had its security improved by the good folks at ConfigServer, and Bobcares continue to provide user support. I’ve also used Linode to supply a bunch of secondary DNS servers.

Corporate Largesse

I’ve decided to introduce this new section, where I declare who’s bought me food and drink or given me gifts, so you can properly judge whether I have been influenced by them in my media coverage. In the last two weeks that’s:

• NetSuite paid for lunch and wine at the Ocean Room, Overseas Passenger Terminal, Circular Quay, along with a dozen or more journalists and analysts. Their message was about how they’re seeing increased demand from middle-sized businesses for their cloud-based products.
• Microsoft Australia provided breakfast at the Australian launch of Windows Phone 7.
• I had coffee and biscuits — quite good biscuits, in fact — at the Sydney Opera House for the launch of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra 2011. They really should provide healthier breakfast options.
• I had lunch at the Carlisle Castle Hotel, Newtown, with a couple of people from the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN).

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Realising her full potential, a billboard which caught my eye at Town Hall station in Sydney. For having “realised her full potential”, this young woman seems remarkably unexcited. Plus I’d have thought that “full potential” is only realised once you get into your career, not just when you get your Bachelor of Commerce or Economics degree.]