My week of Monday 24 to Sunday 30 July 2023 began with tequila, moved through client work in the form of a blog piece and a podcast, as well as a day in Lidcombe, and finished with the death of a friend.
On Saturday, Trudi Hollinsworth passed away, as the phrase goes, “peacefully and surrounded by family”. She was the much-loved wife of Richard Chirgwin, with whom she owned Bunjaree Cottages, the Blue Mountains property where I’ve been based for more than a decade.
Trudi was remarkable. Around 12 years ago she was diagnosed with vasculitis, a poorly-understood category of diseases where your immune systems decides that your own blood vessels are now the enemy. She’d originally been given just a few weeks to live. Instead, she became the longest-living vasculitis case known in Australia, and possibly the world. Papers have been written about her case.
She will be sorely missed by Richard, their sons William and Michael, and they family and friends.
Articles
- Digital developments from Canberra 46. Robodebt’s main villain quit her new job, fraudsters hit the tax office, there’s more news of shoddy government IT procurement, and there’s routine reports from committees.
- Not written by me but by my client Stephen Wilson at Lockstep Consulting, though I edited it: What should a national digital ID look like?.
You can read my previous writing at Authory, where you can also subscribe to an email compilation of any new stories each Sunday morning.
Podcasts
- Also from Lockstep Consulting rather than me, another episode of Making Data Better: Redemption after data disaster: Heartland Payments breach spurs card data innovation. This is different from the usual hacker story or cybersecurity focus, but instead a look at how the payment cards industry transformed its technology. I learned things.
Videos, Photos, Media Appearances, Corporate Largesse
None of these again this week. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel to be notified when new videos appear.
Recommendations
Twitter is no more. Kinda. Elon Musk pressed the button on the rebranding to X, but soon discovered the hard was that it’s difficult to change everything at once.
- Welcome To X, Elon Musk’s Pointless, Sordid-Sounding Twitter Rebrand.
- You won’t be surprised hear that Musk didn’t bother getting permission to modify the Twitter headquarters building, the one he isn’t paying rent on. ‘X’ logo installed atop Twitter building, spurring San Francisco to investigate permit violation. It’s also incredibly bright, blasting light into nearby apartments.
- Yes, Twitter Stopped Paying Rent at Its San Francisco and London Headquarters, Lawsuits Allege.
- Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints.
- Meanwhile the Starling satellites are causing problems, as detailed in this New York Times feature “The tech billionaire has become the dominant power in satellite internet technology. The ways he is wielding that influence are raising global alarms.”
- After Musk announced that Twitter, sorry, X would only offer a dark-mode interface, claiming dark mod is “better in every way” — it’s not — he backed down.
- From John Birmingham, Elon Musk Is Just Donald Trump Without The Decomposing Corn Husk Wig.
- And finally, the 7am podcast ran a great high-level summary, Elon Musk and the letter X: A love story.
In other news:
- Another brilliant Rear Vision podcast this week, White oil: the story and politics of lithium and how Australia became the world’s greatest supplier. Also check out Tom Hegen’s amazing photographs of the Chilean lithium production sites, The Lithium Series
- A fantastic presentation from Perun: South Korean Defence Strategy – Mass, Firepower, Industry & Existential Threats.
- From The New York Times Magazine, The Ongoing Mystery of Covid’s Origin.
- Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon.
The Week Ahead
On Tuesday a friend will be joining me for lunch on the Blue Mountains, after I’ve dealt with a client meeting. [Update 1 August 2023: The meeting has been postponed.]Then on Wednesday I’ll take a day trip to Sydney for a variety of reasons.
All my work will be organised around those two scheduled items, snd presumably also a funeral.
Further Ahead FIX
- Aaron Chen’s Chen & Friends, Enmore Theatre, 18 August 2023.
- NetThing Internet Governance Forum, Brisbane and online, 28 August 2023 (TBC).
- APNIC 56, Kyoto and online, 12–14 September 2023. I very much doubt that I’ll be going to Japan, but this is always such a good conference (TBC).
[Photo: A margarita, photographed at Champagne Charlie’s at the Carrington Hotel, Katoomba, on 24 July 2023 for National (and perhaps World) Tequila Day.]