What a week! Between Monday 30 September and Sunday 6 October 2024 I kicked off a new podcast series, started reviewing my photo archive, and had quite a few naps — but they weren’t as long as last week. I’m very happy with this start to 2024 Q4.
Continue reading “Weekly Wrap 749: The Moth of Reflection”Weekly Wrap 262: From a birthday to a wake
My week of Monday 8 to Sunday 14 June 2015 has been another productive one, despite Monday allegedly being a holiday. Thank you, Your Majesty. I’m exhausted.
I also think I’m coming down with a cold, which is hardly surprising. We’ll see.
There’s much I want to talk about, but this very moment I’m at the regularly monthly Poetry in the Pub in Katoomba. I have Sunday Lunch here many weeks. But this month it’s essentially a wake, because one of their number has passed. I’ll admit that I shed a tear as one chap read Henry Lawson’s “The Glass on the Bar”. My whinges can wait for another time.
Articles
- Is cybersecurity moving away from all the military language?, ZDNet Australia, 9 June 2015. I’ve written before the militarisation of the language of infosec before, so I was surprised to see this column generate some reaction.
- Spearphishing and how to stop it: Some lessons from AusCERT, ZDNet Australia, 12 June 2015.
There’s also two more ZDNet pieces in the pipeline. They’ll appear in the first half of the coming week, I imagine.
Podcasts
None. The next episode of The 9pm Edict is now scheduled for Wednesday 17 Saturday 20 June.
5at5
There were five editions of 5at5 this week, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. That’s more than 25 things for you to read! To save me having to tell you this, you could just subscribe.
Media Appearances
- On Wednesday, I spoke about so-called digital detox on ABC 891 Adelaide.
- On Friday, I spoke about Australia’s proposed new laws for blocking websites that infringe copyright on ABC Riverina and across western NSW,
but there’s no recordingand there’s now a recording.
Corporate Largesse
None.
The Week Ahead
On Monday and Tuesday, I’ll be finishing off those two ZDNet stories. In theory, I’m also heading in to Sydney on Tuesday for the Optus Business Lunch, to hear the company’s chief executive officer Allen Lew deliver a keynote speech on “how customer behaviours are driving digital transformation” — but with deadlines, that may have to be cancelled. That Sydney trip will definitely be cancelled.
On Wednesday, I’ll be completing an episode of The 9pm Edict podcast. On Thursday, I’ll be writing a column for ZDNet. Wednesday and Thursday are writing days, completing those two ZDNet items, plus a piece for Crikey, plus starting on an episode of The 9pm Edict podcast.
On Friday, I’m definitely doing the long commute to Sydney, to go to a lunchtime briefing by the Wynyard Group on corporate and cyber criminals.
On Saturday I’ll be completing the podcast, and perhaps helping with some, um, engineering work at Bunjaree Cottages. While the rest of the weekend has not yet been planned, the Solstice is on Sunday night — well, for me it’s at 0238 AEST on Monday morning — so I’ll be marking the occasion in some way. How? I’m not sure yet. The same applies to the rest of the weekend, I suppose.
Update 15 June 2015: Edited to reflect the schedule change. Second update, 1620 AEST: Edited to add link to ABC Riverina recording. Update 17 June 2015: Edited to reflect further schedule changes.
[Photo: Surveillance, photographed at Wentworth Falls railway station on 13 June 2015.]
This is just to say…
I am, of course, the third-last person on the entire planet to listen to This American Life, the US public radio program presented by Ira Glass. But now I have. And in doing so, I stumbled across some amusing poetry.
The poems are based on an original by William Carlos Williams, called This Is Just To Say. In an episode of This American Life entitled Mistakes Were Made, program contributors created their own versions.
My favourite is the trio by Shalom Auslander:
1
I’m sorry you’re overweight
And drinking
And feeling like everything
In your life
Is doomed to failure
But this is probably why
Mom said
I was her favorite2
It sucks, little doe
That I hit you
with my carBut at least
You weren’t alive
To watch the hunters
Shoot your children3
He was a troublemaker, okay
And didn’t know when
To shut upStill
We never would have killed him
If we’d known he was the Lord
There’s not much poetry here. Should there be more?
Links for 08 April 2009 through 19 April 2009
Stilgherrian’s links for 08 April 2009 through 19 April 2009. Yes, I really do need to find a way to vet these and get them online more quickly. Still, here’s some Sunday reading for you.
- “Storm” by Tim Minchin | 3quarksdaily: I’m perhaps well behind the pace in being exposed to this wonderful 9-minute Beat poem, but I still think it’s worth sharing.
- Free speech? Only if you’re a charity | Memex 1.1: Science Fiction author Harlan Ellison explains why he doesn’t speak for free. A gloriously eloquent rant.
- Back to the Future at Tenenbaum Copyright Trial | TechLaw: In 1993, Prof Pamela Samuelson’s The Copyright Grab warned that large copyright owners were planning a "maximalist agenda" for the digital age. Most of their eight action items made it into the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act 1998. Yet as this recent copyright cases shows, many of the issues are also still raw and open to discussion.
- Thailand’s royal sub-plot | Inside Story: Increasingly, discussions of Thailand's chronic political schisms are mentioning the monarchy. Here’s one such excellent backgrounder.
- The Luckiest or Unluckiest Man in the World? Tsutomu Yamaguchi, double A-bomb victim | Times Online: Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived not one but two atomic bombs. And he’s not the only one.
- Goodbye dolly, hello Nintendo | smh.com.au: Apparently little girls are giving up playing with dolls at an earlier age to use more “structured” playthings and interact with their peers. This article pitches that as a moral panic, with quotes from two psychologists who, presumably, make their living from kids who are developing “abnormally”.
- Finding Utility in the Jumble of Twittered Thoughts | NYTimes.com: Despite starting off with this hackneyed pair of sentences — “The first reaction many people have to Twitter is befuddlement. Why would they want to read short messages about what someone ate for breakfast?” — this is another good article covering the possibilities for Twitter. Mind you, I wouldn’t want my urgent medical alerts sent by a low-reliability system like Twitter!
- Newspapers Begin to Push Back on the Web | NYTimes.com: A nice backgrounder on the current moves by Associated Press to prevent people linking to its content. It doesn’t cover everything — it’s a complicated issue! — but it’s part of the picture.
- Super-fast trip to a world full of surprises | smh.com.au: Mark Pesce’s op-ed piece for Fairfax on the National Broadband Network.
- Predators vs. cyberbullies: Reality check | SafeKids.com: “Compare the figure of 100 adult-to-minor predation cases in 2005 to 6.9 million ‘cases’ of teen-to-teen cyberbullying in 2006.” Indeed, let’s focus on where the real risks are, not the imaginary or extremely rare ones.
- WDM-PON blurs the boundary between metro and last mile | ibresystems.org: WDM-PON (wavelength-division multiplexed passive optical network) could provide broadband operators with an elegant way to simplify and futureproof their access network architecture. Here’s a summary of recent developments.
Links for 26 May 2008 through 01 June 2008
Stilgherrian’s links for 26 May 2008 through 01 June 2008, gathered semi-automatically and covering a disturbing range of topics:
Continue reading “Links for 26 May 2008 through 01 June 2008”
Everyday poetry
My Facebook status says: Stilgherrian is considering. All things considered. Suggest three.
My friend Matt says: Three huh? Pop Rocks; Hopscotch and a Stopwatch.
He’s pretty clever, I think. Now, whatever happened to Pop Rocks?