Author: Stilgherrian

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Weekly Wrap 253: Easter and too many things

En route to Sydney: click to embiggenMy week of Monday 6 to Sunday 12 April 2015 was a little busier than it should have been, given that the Easter long weekend was in there. Mind you, I did plenty of work-related things in there.

I won’t list them all, because some of them were background things that you’re not allowed to know about yet. And some of them were thoughtful, long-term things that will be discussed soon enough. So it’s just the list for now.

Podcasts

  • “The 9pm Government by Fools”, being The 9pm Edict episode 39. It contains a brief rant about pies, amongst other things.

Articles

5at5

Three editions of 5at5 this week, on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. To save me having to tell you this, you could just subscribe.

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

The Week Ahead

I’m in Sydney all this week, and have a bunch of things to do, but in no particular order. I’ve got to plan the next month, produce an episode of The 9pm Edict podcast by Tuesday night, plan out a subscription drive for that podcast, review six TV scripts, write a column for ZDNet Australia, produce and post the recording of last week’s UTS lecture, coordinate some medical treatment, and finally assemble that ebook that’s been lurking in the back of the to-do list for far, far too long.

[Photo: En route to Sydney, being the view from a Blue Mountains line train as it travelled down to Sydney in the early morning light on Thursday 9 April 2015. It was a very different mood from last week’s view.]

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Weekly Wrap 252: Rain, debates, squid and thinking

Forest, rain and train: click to embiggenMy week of Monday 30 March to Sunday 5 April 2015 was and action-packed week of extremes. Kinda.

Well, I made it up as I went along. I was in both Sydney and the Blue Mountains. The weather was variable. Does that count as extreme? How about standing right next to David Marr while he was paying attention to other people and I felt ignored and sulky?

Coming soon to a games store near you, Extreme David Marr.

Articles

Podcasts

5at5

Four editions of 5at5 this week, on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. You should subscribe, you know. If you subscribe, Jesus will love you. Promise.

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None.

The Week Ahead

On Monday, despite it being a public holiday, I’ll be producing the bulk of an episode of The 9pm Edict. On Tuesday, I’ll be doing some errands and shopping in Leura and Katoomba in the morning. In the afternoon, I’ll be planning out some writing for April. And in the evening, I’ll publish the completed podcast.

On Wednesday, I’ll be updating my regular lecture for journalism students at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).

On Thursday, I’ll be making the long commute to Sydney to deliver that lecture at UTS at 0900. Then at 1030 I’m going to the Australian launch of VMware’s vCloudAir. And then I’ll be writing for ZDNet Australia probably.

Friday through Sunday are currently unplanned. It will include, however, the turning of the UTS lecture into a podcast, some writing for someone else, and a variety of revenue-generating activities.

Caveat

The squid is none of your business.

[Photo: Forest, rain and train, being the view from a Blue Mountains line train as it travelled between Katoomba and Leura on a rainy day Friday 3 April 2015.]

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It’s time to turn around the Revenue Ship, and fast

I knew the first three months of 2015 had been bad for business — or at least my little patch of business — but I hadn’t realised it was this bad. Turns out it was my second-worst quarter in more than four years! Drastic action and ruthless decisions are required.

Yes, this is another of my occasional thinking-aloud reflections on my personal circumstances. If you don’t like this sort of thing, then stop reading now. Read this instead.

Still with me? Lovely.

Yesterday I updated my “media objects” chart, which counts how many things I’ve created for each media outlet, regardless of relative complexity or what income was generated. It serves as a handy proxy for revenue — because certain revenue figures are confidential.

Media objects produced monthly, 2011-2015: click to embiggen

It’s a depressing image. At best, Q1 of 2015 was no worse than Q1 of the previous year, but overall it’s still a picture of decline. Literally depressing, in fact, because I’ve left in a couple of health-related markers that I was using to analyse something else.

Back at the end of 2012, I’d tried to inject a little more strategy into the way I ran the business side of making media. This and other charts were some of the tools I created, last updated in February 2014. It’s fair to say that I haven’t really developed any kind of strategy out of the information in those charts, and this new chart illustrates the results from doing that nothing. Go me.

This chart doesn’t reflect certain positives, however. There’s now crowdsourced funding for The 9pm Edict podcast. I also do some minor work for the University of Technology Sydney, and I consult on some other media projects too. There’s also fragmentary revenue from the legacy clients of my IT business.

But I do need to raise my income levels back to something more like they were a few years ago. The next step is to do something about it. And that has been the nature of my ponderings across this Easter long weekend.

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Announcing “The 9pm Intermission”

Recording "Announcing 'The 9pm Intermission'": click to embiggen

Ah yeah, hello. Careful listeners will have noticed that there hasn’t been an episode of The 9pm Edict podcast since early March. And it’s now early April. Sorry about that.

I had most of the pre-production done for an episode on 24 March, and then I got a cold, and then five days later much of what I’d written had become… obsolete as time passed.

So fuck time, basically. In fact, fuck most of physics, because physics does nothing but get in the way of doing anything truly interesting in this world. And fuck science generally.

Continue reading “Announcing “The 9pm Intermission””
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Talking Bitcoin’s blockchain on 2SER’s The Wire

The Wire logoOn Monday I recorded an interview on Bitcoin’s secret sauce, the blockchain, with The Wire, the current affairs program for Australia’s community radio network produced by 2SER in Sydney. It went to air that night as past their story Blockchains to the rescue?

It was only a couple of years ago that Bitcoin was taking the world by storm — the price rocketing by hundreds of percent. Since then, however, it has fallen into obscurity, with less and less companies accepting it as payment. But even if Bitcoin does not make it as a full fledged currency, the technology behind it may find a place elsewhere.

Journalist Josh Nicholas also spoke with Professor David Glance, Director of University of Western Australia’s Centre for Software Practice. The narrative contrasts my enthusiasm, for want of a better work, with Glance’s scepticism. That’s probably down to the questions asked and the editing, because I suspect our views are actually much the same.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 4:21 — 2.6MB)

The audio is ©2015 2SER-FM 107.3. It’s also available at The Wire program website — that’s exactly the same as what you can hear here, it’s just that the audio file here has my branding — and you can also listen to the entire episode.