The 9pm Election Unhinging: The Aftermath

Australia’s new Foreign Minister, Senator Penny Wong, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, boarding Royal Australian Air Force Airbus KC-30A registration A39-007 in Canberra before departing for Tokyo on 23 May 2022. (Screenshot: 10 News First)

Well then. It happened. Anthony Albanese is Prime Minister and Australia has a new Labor government. There’s a sense of hope in the air, but there’s also a sense of hesitation.

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Weekly Wrap 17

A weekly summary of what I’ve been doing elsewhere on the internets, for those who haven’t been paying attention properly.

It’s a bit thin this week. After doing 30+ hours and a couple of all-nighters last weekend for that server migration I mentioned last time, I’ve been taking it slowly during this week. And I’m getting this post done on Friday night because I’m heading to Newcastle first thing tomorrow.

Articles

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 59, “Opening up the cloud”. My guest is open-source software developer and advocate Jeff Waugh. In a wide-ranging conversation they cover Linode and OpenStack; as well as DevOps, a new software development paradigm that involves operational staff in the entire development process; a DevOps tool called Cucumber, and its plug-in cucumber-nagios, written by Australian developer Lindsay Holmwood; and the social source code management system Github. And Richard Chirgwin debunks the myth that optical fibre only lasts 15 or 20 years.

Geekery

I’ll tell you more about what I’ve been doing next week.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags.

[Photo: Making TV at Aria: Lisa Creffield of Sky News Business interviews Peter Baxter from AVG at Aria Restaurant, Circular Quay, Sydney, following a lunchtime media briefing.]

A Meditation at 11,700 metres, 719km/h

I’m currently sitting in seat 30A of Virgin Blue’s 737-800 airliner, registrated as VH-VOK but nicknamed “Smoochy Maroochy”, sipping a moderately acceptable cabernet merlot which arrived in a little plastic bottle.

I’d chosen this seat for two reasons. Statistically this is the safest seat in the aircraft. But more importantly, it’s the first time I’ve crossed the Nullarbor, and I wanted a clear view of the desert uninterrupted by wings.

My plans have been thwarted. But I have been given an unexpected treat.

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