Weekly Wrap 134: Christmas contrasts and introspection

The perfect user interface: click to embiggenThe week of Monday 24 to Sunday 30 December 2012 was an exercise in contrasts. There were plenty of reminders that, as has been the case for many years, my pattern of work and not-work periods is out of whack with the bulk of society.

Monday was Christmas Eve. Most people in regular jobs had an easy day, if they hadn’t already clocked off the previous Friday afternoon. I, however, was awake and working ridiculously early to complete the three media item you see listed below.

I finished by lunchtime, though, so I made my way from my Hurstville apartment-sitting to the Sydney CBD for lunch and drinks with a friend.

I didn’t work on Christmas Day. I’m not a complete idiot. But with family distant both physically and emotionally, there was no Christmas party. Instead, I spent some quality time with someone who has yet to be formally introduced to this narrative.

The rest of the week was a random montage of catch-up bookkeeping, long overdue errands, intermittent bursts of sleep and the occasional meal or two, some of which may have involved wine, all set against a background of quiet introspection. None of it involved any traditional Australian summer holiday activities, for which I am deeply grateful.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 169, “Uncovering the smartphone: a year 10 perspective”. A rather different podcast to end the year, namely a look at what happened when the Year 10 students at North Sydney Girls High School spent six weeks away from normal classes to work on projects of their choice that were somehow related to the smartphone.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None. Australia is currently closed.

The Week Ahead

I expect that Monday and Tuesday, being New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day respectively, will be taken up with the traditional activities of those days. Or at least my variations thereupon. No. Mind your own business.

Wednesday through Friday I’ll continue my planning for 2013. You saw the first instalment of that earlier today, Doing the business on Stilgherrian’s journalism, but it’s not just about my work. There’s also questions about what the magazines call “work-life balance” before flogging the book for $24.95, questions of diet and exercise and how I structure my day. Even the question of where I live.

I’ll post more about that as it happens. For now, I’ll just say that I’ve recognised so many things that could be changed that it’ll be daunting.

[Photo: The perfect user interface, photographed on near Town Hall station, Sydney, on 28 December 2012. It’s always important to focus on your core message.]

Doing the business on Stilgherrian’s journalism

As 2012 draws to a close, it’s become clear to me that many aspects of my life should be reassessed for next year. One of the more important is my work — that is, what I do for who, how often and for how much.

Last night I made a couple of pictures to help me understand the issues I’ll need to think about. This first one shows the relative importance of each masthead, at least in revenue terms, based on the gross income they generated in 2012. I’m surprised.

Stilgherrian's income from journalism in 2012 by masthead: see story for the numbers

I knew ZDNet was my biggest earner. What I didn’t realise was that my written stories for them, either ad hoc commissions or as conference coverage, when combined with the weekly Patch Monday podcast, represent roughly five times the revenue of the second-place holder, CSO Online.

Continue reading “Doing the business on Stilgherrian’s journalism”

Fine posts for 2012

AWStats screenshot: click to embiggenAs in previous years, the list of most popular posts for 2012 was rather disappointing, so I’ve hand-curated this list of eight stories for you to consider.

As usual, this does not include the material I wrote elsewhere, for ZDNet Australia, Technology Spectator, CSO Online, Crikey, ABC The Drum and the rest. That’s all listed on my Media Output page.

  1. Two casually racist encounters concerning Auburn, being the most recent of my essay-style posts.
  2. Insulted, ASIO? That’s not really the problem, surely?
  3. ASIO’s got it easy, says terrorism expert
  4. Consilium: Social media is destroying society? Good! This is the recording and transcript of my opening and closing remarks at Consilium, and I think I said some good things.
  5. iSpy: Talking total surveillance at Sydney Writers’ Festival, being the recorded audio of the panel discussion I did.
  6. Why tweeting my movements isn’t a safety risk, which is what it says.
  7. Stilgherrian’s advice to a PR student, uhoh, which is some useful if unconventional material.
  8. Twitter Discourse 1: Fuck off, swearing is my birthright. Because it is.

If you’d like to compare this with previous years, try these:

[Photo: Screenshot of AWStats from this website. It’d make more sense for this image to be on the most-popular story list, but I have my reasons.]

Most popular posts of 2012

Is it that time of year already? Yes, it is. This is the first in a series of posts looking back at what I’ve done and how people reacted, being a list of the most-read posts on this website from 2012.

Like last year, there’s not a lot to choose from because most of my writing is done elsewhere these days. Indeed, there are very few posts apart from the Weekly Wrap posts and the Conversations podcast that contains the radio and TV spots I do. That means some rather mundane pieces of writing, such as the Weekly Wrap, end up on the list. I intend to change this in 2013.

  1. Twitter screwed up TweetDeck, so here’s the old version, being a place to download the old Adobe AIR version of the popular Twitter client, the last one before Twitter screwed it up.
  2. Weekly Wrap 101: Codeine and counter-surveillance. I’ve no idea why this routine post proved more popular than usual.
  3. Two casually racist encounters concerning Auburn, the first item on the list that’s something like the essay-style blog posts I used to do.
  4. Flame gets me talking cyberwar worms on The Project, containing video of my first appearance on the Channel TEN program, The Project.
  5. cPanel’s new EULA: more software industry arrogance?, in which I complain that it’s a bit rich to present a new end-user license agreement at the moment new software is being installed on a production server.
  6. Insulted, ASIO? That’s not really the problem, surely?, an essay that continued my thoughts from that week’s Patch Monday podcast.
  7. Separated at birth: Bob Katter and Ben Grubb?, which is reasonably self-explanatory.
  8. Talking new internet domains on ABC RN Sunday Extra, which is also self-explanatory.
  9. Weekly Wrap 118: Planes, pains and delays
  10. Twitter Discourse 1: Fuck off, swearing is my birthright. I never did get around to writing Twitter Discourse 2.

Continue reading “Most popular posts of 2012”

Weekly Wrap 133: Instagram, infosec and random nativity

Suburban Nativity: click to embiggenMonday 17 to Sunday 23 December 2012 was a week filled with plenty of work, plenty of stress and a small amount of exhaustion.

The media outputs are listed below, as usual. Towards the end of the week the long series of 5am and earlier starts was beginning to catch up with me, and on Thursday I accidentally slept in until lunchtime — and that was truly wonderful.

I decided to continue that level of sloth on the weekend. Well, apart from today, obviously. As mentioned below, there’s still quite a bit left to do before I can finally break for Christmas.

Also this week I dropped and broke my Samsung Galaxy S III, necessitating an urgent replacement. While doing that I discovered some gotchas with migrating data to a new phone, and I’ll write about that after Christmas.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 168, “2012 infosec review: Focus on crime, not cyberwar”. The second of our two year-end conversations. The panelists are Paul Ducklin, Sophos’ head of technology for Asia Pacific; Chris Gatford, director of penetration testing firm HackLabs; Jon Callas, chief technology officer at Entrust, and now also of secure messaging provider Silent Circle; and Stephen Wilson, managing director of Lockstep Group, which provides advice and analysis on digital identity and privacy technologies.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Wednesday I had a very pleasant lunch indeed at Bistrode at the Hotel CBD in Sydney with a couple of chaps from Trend Micro. Needless to say, it was on their tab.

The Week Ahead

There’s tonight and one working day left before Christmas. In that time I have to produce a Patch Monday podcast, my end-of-year story for Crikey, and a follow-up to Friday’s story for CSO Online. I’ll be busy for the next 24 hours, though for all those things I’ve already got a plan in mind so they should be straightforward.

But then Tuesday is Christmas Day, and from then through to the end of the week I have precisely nothing planned. Sure, there’s a few little work-related things that’ll need to be polished off, but there are no pressing commitments. This pleases me immensely.

[Photo: Suburban Nativity, photographed on Stony Creek Road in Beverly Hills, Sydney, on 15 December 2012. The householders must do this every year, because the same nativity scene is visible in Google Street View imagery from December 2009.]

Talking Instagram on ABC 666 Canberra

ABC logoBy the time I got to doing my third radio spot about the Instagram saga, the issues were clear in my mind and I had a few well-rehearsed sound bites. So my final spot on ABC 666 Canberra was smooth.

I don’t think I need to provide any more background. My conversation with Louise Maher stands for itself, I think. We didn’t speak for as long as we’d originally intended, but they also had to update their listeners on the progress of some bushfires and that does have priority.

This audio is ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and is an unedited copy of what went to air, though the ABC has not posted it online as far as I know.

At some point in the next few days I’ll post further thoughts about this Instagram incident. Stay tuned.