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.

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. Microsoft has banned me from covering TechEd, which is self-explanatory.
  6. Choosing my next media directions: you’re doing it, OK?, from May.
  7. Vodafone Australia’s new 4G network ain’t bad, being the write-up of my trial of the network which led to that conclusion.
  8. Weekly Wrap 152: LulzSec, Optus, radio and thinking stuff, which I suspect is only in the Top 10 because it mentions LulzSec.
  9. Weekly Wrap 155: Chemtrails, elitism and much thinking, ditto, chemtrails.
  10. Sydney Harbour “giant gambling den” bullshit reportage, from January.

Continue reading “Most popular posts of 2013”

Weekly Wrap 185: A post-productivity period, primarily

Poster for iloveshopping24hrs.com: click to embiggenHere’s the key stuff that happened in my week of Monday 16 to Sunday 22 December 2013. Like last week, it wasn’t nearly as productive as I wanted it to be.

Articles

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

None. I’m guessing that all the corporate types had stopped worrying about the clients and started worrying about their own end-of-year parties.

The Week Ahead

Well Monday has already happened, and it wasn’t very productive. Tuesday is just beginning, and it’s full of errands in and around the Sydney CBD. It’s also Christmas Eve, so once those errands are done I’ll be turning down the productivity dial even further for the rest of the week.

I may write a couple things over the remainder of the week, or I may not. It’ll all depend upon how I feel at the time.

[Photo: Poster for iloveshopping24hrs.com, photographed at Yok Yor Thai Food Factory, 19 December 2013.]