It’ll take a few more days to catch up on the blog posts here, so if you want the latest dose of my wisdom you should of course be following my Twitter stream. Or not. You get to decide.
Weekly Wrap 188: Long views to launch another long year
My week of Monday 6 to Sunday 12 January 2014 saw the start of some productivity for 2014, but for various reasons was relatively slow — and as usual when I’m posting late, it’s “just the facts”.
Articles
- 2014, the year that infosec gets political, CSO Online, 6 January 2014. This was actually written at the very end of November 2013 for a print publication handed out through December, which is why it’s missing some of the most recent Snowden revelations.
- Australian retailers recruiting generals for yesterday’s war, ZDNet Australia, 10 January 2014. I don’t often write about retail, but the decisions by both Myer and David Jones to search for new CEOs without specifically looking for online clue struck me as a particularly daft strategy.
Media Appearances
None.
Corporate Largesse
None. It’ll be another week or two before the hospitality starts flowing again.
Weekly Wrap 187: A slow start to 2014, thankfully
My week of Monday 30 December 2013 to Sunday 5 January 2014 was, like last week, devoid of productivity and reportable interestingness thanks to the slow week between Christmas and New Year and the slow days thereafter.
I have been thinking about 2014, however, and I may pour some of those thoughts into a blog post some time in the next few days. The brief version is roughly “Thank fuck 2013 is over and done with, and here’s to a much better 2014.”
Certainly yesterday, Saturday, contained a significantly odd and yet strangely wonderful event.
No, there shall be no details.
The Week Ahead
Well, the working year kicks off properly tomorrow, Monday, so I guess I’ll be starting to focus on planning out January. I have very little mapped out just now — the only firm appointments are a couple of social events — but with the PR folks back at their desks tomorrow, the next few days will see the invitations and other communications kick off.
And I need to placate my editors after a rather unproductive November and December.
I’m in Sydney currently, and will stay in Sydney through to Tuesday before returning to Wentworth Falls — though there’s a chance that plan might change at relatively short notice. As always.
I know I have some writing to do, namely my usual column for ZDNet Australia and the remaining loose ends for the Corrupted Nerds hacker conference thingy.
Weekly Wrap 186: Christmas-related brevity, nothing else
My week of Monday 23 to Sunday 29 December 2013 was primarily the slack week either side of Christmas, so there’s nothing in the way of written articles, podcasts, corporate largesse or future plans to report.
As a result, this post will be remarkably short.
Fine posts for 2013, such that they are
As in previous years, the list of most popular posts for 2013 was disappointing, so I’ve hand-curated this list of seven stories for you to consider instead.
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, although I’ll probably highlight a few articles of enduring interest some time in the next few days.
- See this, folks? It’s a picture of democracy, being my defence of the Daily Telegraph’s right to conduct whatever party-political campaigning they like. Even if you don’t like it, the newspaper does still have freedom of political speech.
- Microsoft has banned me from covering TechEd, which I still consider to have been an ill-thought move on their part.
- My guest lecture in March to first-year journalism and media studies students at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) on Algorithms and the Filter Bubble, plus the updated versions from August, Take 2A and Take 2B. All three are available as audio files, plus the accompanying slides.
- Why people who say “train station” sound stupid, being my first foray into computational linguistics.
- My fish are dead: the black dog ate them (an explanation?), being an announcement and discussion about my encounter with severe depression this year — something which still has a significant impact on my life.
- Six Pigeons for Jeffrey, being my personal photographic tribute to this fascinating Australian artist.
- Hillary’s mangoes, no NSA involved, which is more about the daft reactions to Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s surveillance operations.
If you’d like to compare this with previous years, try these:
Most popular posts of 2013
As we approach the end of 2013, I’m going to do my usual series of blog posts looking back at what actually happened on this little planet. This is the first, being a list of the most-read posts on this website.
There hasn’t been a lot to choose from in the last couple of years, because most of my writing is done elsewhere these days. That means some rather mundane pieces of writing, such as Weekly Wrap posts, end up on the list. That’s possibly an argument for abandoning this little exercise.
- Catchup posts within 36 hours was the most popular post of all, which makes no sense whatsoever because it’s routine administrivia. I suspect the visitor count has been artificially inflated somehow, though supposedly the traffic generated by spambots has already been removed.
- My tweets from TechEd Australia 2012’s keynote sessions, a post that was linked to from news stories that reported me having been banned from attending Microsoft’s TechEd conference. My own blog post on this issue is coming up at number 5.
- Guardian Australia not the droid you’re looking for, being my reaction against all the excitement generated in January 2013 by the announcement that there would soon be an Australian edition of this news masthead.
- My fish are dead: the black dog ate them (an explanation?), being my rather idiosyncratic announcement and discussion of the fact that I’d been dealing with a severe depression episode, published in July.
- Microsoft has banned me from covering TechEd, which is self-explanatory.
- Choosing my next media directions: you’re doing it, OK?, from May.
- Vodafone Australia’s new 4G network ain’t bad, being the write-up of my trial of the network which led to that conclusion.
- Weekly Wrap 152: LulzSec, Optus, radio and thinking stuff, which I suspect is only in the Top 10 because it mentions LulzSec.
- Weekly Wrap 155: Chemtrails, elitism and much thinking, ditto, chemtrails.
- Sydney Harbour “giant gambling den” bullshit reportage, from January.