Tag: depression

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Weekly Wrap 190: Wattle you know, some productivity!

Australia Day in the eucalypt forest: click to embiggenMy week of Monday 20 to Sunday 26 January 2014 saw the return of something approaching productivity, as well as a stabilisation of the chaos. Excellent.

I’ve also started to get a clearer idea of where I want to take my media work in 2014, but more about that another time.

Articles

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

  • On Tuesday one of the police sergeants at Katoomba gave me two packets of blue jelly beans. This is not a euphemism. They were part of the community outreach they were doing at the Katoomba Village shops. They were yummy.

There was nothing more substantial, surprisingly. But the coming week has some, and I’m looking forward to it.

The Week Ahead

I’ve finally caught up with these posts, so it’s now worth writing about my plans again. I wonder how long this will last?

As I write this on a holiday Monday afternoon, I’m still in the Blue Mountains. However I plan to be in Sydney overnight on Tuesday and Thursday, in both cases because there’s a good chance that certain business-social events in the evening could run a bit late. Or a bit messy. Or both. I’ll be in Sydney Tuesday through to Friday.

As always, the plan could change at short notice, so either pay attention to my Twitter stream or look at the calendar.

Tuesday will primarily be about mapping out the next few weeks — something that needs re-doing after the unproductive weeks disrupted my previous version of the plan. I won’t jinx it now by proposing when I do what, however. Let’s just watch it unfold.

[Update 28 January 2014, 1055 AEDT: Deleted references to being in Sydney on Tuesday. Plans changed.]

[Update 29 January 2014, 1610 AEDT: Changed references to when I’d be in Sydney again. Because plans changed again.]

[Photo: Australia Day in the eucalypt forest, being a lovely rendition of a wattle of some description on a quiet, drizzly day. Now bad for a photo taken on a bashed-up smartphone.]

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Weekly Wrap 189: Net Neutrality, damage and drugs

I'm sure it isn't meant to look like this: click to embiggenMy week of Monday 13 to Sunday 19 January 2014 was a little less productive than planned, but I did knock off a couple of items about Net Neutrality.

The productivity plunge was largely down to me changing medication for depression. It’s always a bit of a roller coaster ride as you change from one drug to another, lasting a week or more, and this was no exception. Looking ahead in time to the present, though, I’m thinking we may have gotten it right this time. Fingers crossed.

But my mood was also hit by a potential technical disaster. I knocked my MacBook Pro off the table once too often, and instead of the MagSafe plug popping out of the power socked as it should have, it jammed — and the plug itself was torn in half.

I stressed and stressed and stressed — until I realised I had access to a spare power adapter and, using that, discovered that the computer still worked as it should. Big sigh of relief.

Articles

I also wrote an op-ed on Sunday afternoon, but since it wasn’t published until Monday it’ll appear in next week’s wrap.

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

None. But it’ll definitely start flowing again soon.

[Photo: I’m sure it isn’t meant to look like this, showing the accumulated damage to my MacBook Pro on 13 January 2014.]

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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.

  1. 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.
  2. Microsoft has banned me from covering TechEd, which I still consider to have been an ill-thought move on their part.
  3. 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.
  4. Why people who say “train station” sound stupid, being my first foray into computational linguistics.
  5. 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.
  6. Six Pigeons for Jeffrey, being my personal photographic tribute to this fascinating Australian artist.
  7. 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:

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Weekly Wrap 184: TV and radio, but no writing, alas

Here’s the key stuff that happened in my week of Monday 9 to Sunday 15 December 2013.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I’ll do some sort of more detailed post explaining the state of the world — or at least my little bit of it — once I’ve caught up on these posts.

Articles

None. This was the terribly unproductive week that I haven’t told you about yet.

Media Appearances

Corporate Largesse

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Weekly Wrap 180: Nothing happened, with arsehats

Crossing the Nepean, 12 November 2013: click to embiggenMy week Monday 11 to Sunday 17 November 2013 was completely unproductive, for reasons which shall be explained in the next five paragraphs.

At the tail end of the previous week’s trip to Canberra, I changed my medication for depression — something that I’d discussed with my doctor beforehand, of course, but there were side effects nevertheless.

My sleep patterns took several days to readjust, and during that time I was more susceptible to the depression being exacerbated by the kind of arsehat events that the universe throws at us from time to time.

One such arsehat event happened. Or didn’t happen. A key invoice didn’t get paid when it was expected to be paid. Cashflow stress ensued, and that arsehat was the straw that broke the camel’s back, turning it into a black dog. Stay with me now, OK.

My mood wasn’t exactly improved by the fact that it rained for almost the entire week. There’s a strong seasonal aspect to my depression. And that rain was just a cruel twist, given that only the week before we’d been worried about everything being incinerated in bushfires.

This is a stupid planet, and humans are a stupid, badly-designed species.

I did catch up on a lot of reading, however.

Podcasts

None.

Articles

None.

Media Appearances

None.

Corporate Largesse

  • On Tuesday, after I crowdsourced a few beers and ciders in Sydney because the aforementioned cashflow stress made the concept of paying for my own drinks problematic, I ended up being invited to dinner at Kobe Jones’ Wharf Teppanyaki at Sydney’s King Street Wharf, courtesy of Enex Testlab. There is evidence to suggest that I was provided with an ample sufficiency of sake.

The Week Ahead

Well it’s half finished already, innit. But it began on a positive note. The cashflow constipation was uncorked on Monday, so I could start living again.

On Tuesday I came down to Sydney to take lunch with the boss-blokes from Sophos, the British-American information security firm, and deal with a whole bunch of errands.

Wednesday was a day of resetting all the things.

Thursday — that is to say, today — I’ll be starting work on a 2000-word feature story for ZDNet Australia that has to be finished by the end of next week, as well as participating in a discussion which will Rearrange Certain Aspects of Reality. That will all become less cryptic in due course. Or not.

Friday is a day of writing, with columns for both ZDNet Australia and CSO Online, and over the weekend I’ll be writing something for Corrupted Nerds.

In fact, the next three weeks will be quite busy, because I have to generate some catch-up revenue to replace last week’s steaming pile of fail, as well as make sure there’s enough revenue coming in to cover the time of year that freelancers fear most: Christmas.

“Holidays” is a synonym for “poverty” rather than “tequila”. It’s enough to make Baby Jesus cry.

[Photo: Crossing the Nepean, 12 November 2013, a dark, moody image that seems to capture the depressing nature of the week.]