There is no Weekly Wrap post number 135. These words are here simply to both cause and prevent confusion.
On Twitter, the Silly Season, and a certain list
“It really does seem that it’s now that time of the year on Twitter when I could admit to raping a nun no one would notice,” I tweeted in the early hours of New Year’s Eve. “Or even fucking a pig, for that matter.”
The traditional media Silly Season seems to apply to all these new-fangled media operations as well. On and on about the goddam cricket, they tweet.
Meanwhile the traffic levels, and hence the potential audience for any tweets you might tweet, are way down. Hence my coenobitic considerations and porcine ponderings.
“Maybe I should just tweet about all of the things that you shouldn’t fuck until it turns 2013,” I tweeted, despite what Charlie Brooker might think.
And so I did. For the next hour and forty minutes.
Here’s the list. I reckon that just reading it here, without the real-time performance aspect, diminishes it. Nevertheless, enjoy.
Continue reading “On Twitter, the Silly Season, and a certain list”
Weekly Wrap 134: Christmas contrasts and introspection
The 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
- Could 2013 be the year we finally sort out security?, CSO Online, 24 December 2012. It’s a rhetorical question, of course. The answer is “No”.
- Tech in ’12: take nothing for granted online, Crikey, 24 December 2012.
Media Appearances
- ABC Radio National broadcast a repeat of the Life Matters episode What’s in a name? first broadcast on 31 August 2012. I joined that program live via Skype from San Francisco.
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.
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
As 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.
- Two casually racist encounters concerning Auburn, being the most recent of my essay-style posts.
- Insulted, ASIO? That’s not really the problem, surely?
- ASIO’s got it easy, says terrorism expert
- 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.
- iSpy: Talking total surveillance at Sydney Writers’ Festival, being the recorded audio of the panel discussion I did.
- Why tweeting my movements isn’t a safety risk, which is what it says.
- Stilgherrian’s advice to a PR student, uhoh, which is some useful if unconventional material.
- 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.
- 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.
- Weekly Wrap 101: Codeine and counter-surveillance. I’ve no idea why this routine post proved more popular than usual.
- 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.
- Flame gets me talking cyberwar worms on The Project, containing video of my first appearance on the Channel TEN program, The Project.
- 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.
- Insulted, ASIO? That’s not really the problem, surely?, an essay that continued my thoughts from that week’s Patch Monday podcast.
- Separated at birth: Bob Katter and Ben Grubb?, which is reasonably self-explanatory.
- Talking new internet domains on ABC RN Sunday Extra, which is also self-explanatory.
- Weekly Wrap 118: Planes, pains and delays
- Twitter Discourse 1: Fuck off, swearing is my birthright. I never did get around to writing Twitter Discourse 2.