Thanks to the COVID-10 lockdown and, it must be admitted, quite a bit of laziness, the entirety of my week of Monday 11 to Sunday 17 May 2020 was spent less than 50 metres from my bed. Well, from the house. I did get out of bed a bit.
Throughout my ninth week of lockdown I was still reasonably well stocked with food and alcohol, so there was no need for me to go anywhere. NSW has now relaxed some restrictions as part of Step 1 of the plan, but I won’t enjoy these new freedoms until the coming week.
This week’s Lowy Institute discussion with former foreign ministers Julie Bishop and Gareth Evans was rather interesting. Here’s the video and the audio.
Podcasts
- “The 9pm His Plague Diary 9â€, being The 9pm Edict episode 105 recorded on Saturday. It’s also on Spreaker and SoundCloud, as well as Apple Podcasts, Castbox, Deezer, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, Podchaser, and Spotify.
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Articles
- Australia’s wobbly start to COVIDSafe app transparency, ZDNet, 11 May 2020. Evidence of more spin and an even greater lack of transparency emerged during the week. I haven’t been commissioned to write about it yet, but I did a quick summary in the Well May We Say segment below.
Media Appearances
- On Wednesday I spoke about the COVIDSafe app yet again on ABC Adelaide. There’s a lot of public interest in all this, and rightly so.
- I provided a 3-minute rant for “Disincentive To Work (feat Denise Sear-Pirko)â€, this week’s episode of Well May We Say, the Australian politics podcast from Jeremy Sear-Pirko. If you like, you can skip ahead to that segment.
- For some reason my photo of the urinals at Sydney Opera House was used to illustrate an article at Polish interior design site Domino-Sklep titled Jak odÅ›wieżyć Å‚azienkÄ™, or “How to refresh a bathroom”. I have no idea.
Corporate Largesse
None, but thanks as always to the new and returning supporters who hit the tip jar. You’re more than welcome to do the same.
The Week Ahead
The isolation continues at Bunjaree Cottages at Wentworth Falls, and I’ll continue to attempt to catch up with my writing for ZDNet.
On Monday evening I’ll drop in to John Martinkus in conversation with Mark Davis, about Davis’ book The Road: Uprising in West Papua. I don’t know enough about this. Most Autralians don’t know enough about this. Update 19 May 2020: I missed watching the livestream, but there will be a video in due course.
Thursday sees a day trip to Sydney for a medical-adjacent appointment and probably a couple of other things.
There will almost certainly be yet another His Plague Diary episode of The 9pm Edict at some point.
Further Ahead
There’s still almost nothing scheduled for certain. These conference dates are tentative.
- AusCERT 2020 Cyber Security Conference, online, 15–18 September 2020.
- Australian Cyber Conference, Melbourne, 27-29 October 2020 (TBC).
- Australian Cyber Conference, Canberra, 14–16 March 2021 (TBC).
[Photo: Dismantling the Fallen Tree. Our neighbours at Bunjaree Cottages have been slowly dismantling a tree that blew over in a wind storm mid-April. This is how exciting things have been during the COVID-19 lockdown. Photographed on 9 May 2020.]