Month: October 2011

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Talking Steve Jobs on Triple J’s “Hack”

Just minutes after finishing my conversation on ABC Gold Coast via a TARDIS at the ABC’s Ultimo studios in Sydney, I headed upstairs to Triple J to chat about Steve Jobs on their national current affairs program Hack.

I’ve posted their entire segment on Jobs, because I think Hack did a great job of exploring so many issues in a short time. The presenter is Tom Tilley.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (6.0MB)

The audio is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It has been extracted from the full program audio [MP3]. Broadcast 6 October 2011.

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Talking Steve Jobs on ABC Gold Coast

My Crikey piece on the death of Steve Jobs was written in just one hour, and yet it seems to have struck a chord. I ended up doing four media spots — and this one for ABC Gold Coast was the first.

The presenter is Tony Johnston.

He chose to top and tail the segment with extracts from Jobs’ much-loved 2005 speech at Stanford University. You can watch the video or read the text. It’s worth it, even if you’re not a Jobs fan.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.2MB)

The audio is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, presented here as always because the ABC doesn’t generally post these live interviews and it’s a decent plug for them. Broadcast 6 October 2011.

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Talking iPhone 4S on 1395 FIVEaa Adelaide

I’d originally planned to ignore the iPhone 4S news this week, but early Wednesday morning I got an SMS from Adelaide radio 1395 FIVEaa and… well… here it is. My chat with Keith Conlon, John Kenneally and Jane Doyle.

What’s embarrassing listening back to it today is that I’d completely missed the significance of Siri, the combination of voice recognition and artificial intelligence that creates personal assistant far more sophisticated than mere voice-control of the phone.

Oops.

My excuse? My entire research time was about seven minutes.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.0MB)

The audio is ©2011 dmgRadio Australia. Even though they did put this on their own website, I don’t know how long that’ll last. Besides, this is a reasonable plug.

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Here comes all the Apple-related media

A quick heads-up. I’m about to post all of the media spots I did this week relating to Apple’s release of the iPhone 4S and the death of Steve Jobs.

That’s in addition to the pieces I did for Crikey:

Normal service, on a wider range of topics, will doubtless resume tomorrow. Or Monday. Or… somewhen.

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Weekly Wrap 69: Teeth and little productivity

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets — and a remarkably unproductive week it was. I’m even posting this summary late!

In part that’s because the Tooth and Shoulder Situation lingered, but also because I reacted poorly to some negative comments on some of my writing. I’ll write more about that soon.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 107, “Cyberwar: back to basics”. A conversation with Nigel Phair, a director of the Centre for Internet Safety at the University of Canberra.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Tuesday I had lunch at Wildfire Restaurant, Circular Quay, courtesy of Bass PR. The event was a security roundtable presented by some of their clients, including Websense, WatchGuard and VMinformer, and analysts Frost & Sullivan. I’ll write something about this in due course.

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: My first beer after nearly three weeks of illness and heavy-duty antibiotics. Much deserved. It’s a Coopers Pale Ale at The Grand View Hotel, Wentworth Falls. This event actually happened the previous week, but I’m slow.]

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The ghost of Octobers past

Three posts in a row from my ABC Radio spots? That’s too many. So until I get around to writing something original, how about we ponder some previous Octobers when I used to write a Letter from Newcastle, or about antlers, or just the random thoughts from an altitude of 11,700 metres.

Three years ago I even managed to tweet some interesting observations and compile them into blog posts. But these days Twitter has completely taken over the role of recording my personal life and this website has, I think, suffered.

I used to post long, thoughtful essays. Now, such essays tend to be about the things I write about for money, and published elsewhere — and there’s nothing wrong with that, except that I’m possibly becoming typecast as a “tech writer”. But between writing several pieces a week for money and maintaining a high-volume Twitter stream, there isn’t time or energy left for much else.

My other podcast The 9pm Edict has disappeared. So has my little video program Stilgherrian Live. So have presentations like the one I did for PodCamp 2007.

Have I got the balance right? I think not.

That’s not all I’ve gotten wrong this year. But I won’t wallow in the mistakes here. Or at least not now. I’ll merely note that perhaps I do need to disconnect more, provide more time for reflection. And maybe those thoughtful essays will reappear.