Weekend Things, S02E02

Fairfax announced a big annual loss of close to a billion dollars this week. There was speculation that they might cancel the daily print edition but that hasn’t happened so far, although it’s obviously coming. It’s been a while since I picked up the printed paper — in fact, I left Australia before the switch to tabloid, and I don’t think I’ve ever even really browsed one. Greg Hywood talks about Fairfax completing its transformation from newspaper business to digital business, but the Age and SMH websites are intolerably bad in both content and construction, and I’ve basically given up. My first stops for news these days are New York Times and the Guardian, both of which I gladly pay money for.

Speaking of Australia and the digital dark ages: the Australian Bureau of Statistics attempted to gather census responses online this year, but the website fell over within an hour or two of people starting to fill out their forms, and was down for more than 48 hours. I love the census — I love the idea of a point-in-time demographic snapshot — and it makes me sad that this year’s might be invalid, probably undermining all future censuses.

The CPSU notes that the technical cause — a “hack”? a denial of service? — is barely relevant in the light of the general chaos at the ABS:

There are 700 fewer staff at the ABS now than when the last Census was conducted five years ago and as a result staff are suffering under massive workloads. Critical planning time was lost as the Government foolishly considered axing the Census, chopped and changed ministers three times and dilly-dallied for nearly a year in appointing a new chief statistician.

(The chief statistician is paid $700k a year, apparently. ✋🏼)

For all Turnbull’s ‘agile’ ‘innovative’ I-am-a-digital-native-look-at-my-iPad posturing, his government is still apparently as useless as any previous government on digital services and infrastructure. The NDIS payment portal has been down for eight weeks! And it’s faintly devastating to return from three years away and discover that there’s still no date for the NBN coming to Fitzroy. The DTO is encouraging, but they’re not quite at the point of delivering live results yet.

Meanwhile, in America this week, a sensible and readable policy on open source software development and usage in government, and the Whitehouse launches a new Messenger Bot for sending letters to the President.

Brendan Dassey’s conviction has been thrown out and he must be released or retried without reference to the coerced confession that put him in jail in the first place. Making a Murderer was fascinating television, and without it Dassey would be spending the rest of his life in prison.

The New Yorker Radio Hour re-played an interview with Paul Simon from a few years back. There’s a great bit, starting at about 19:20, where he walks through the process of writing Darling Lorraine — discovering the story by accident. The way a word turns.

Worky things: Dan Mall has some good notes on design systems as he contemplates building one for “an organization in the top 10 of the Fortune 500”, and I liked (?) this ProPublica article about deadly design mistakes.

“Some people have even gone to the extent of self-harming and people have self-immolated in an effort to get to Australia.”

I thought I hated Reith and Ruddock, but Peter Dutton takes it to a whole new level of vileness. Or perhaps it’s the same level of vileness: “People have self-immolated” is basically the same as “they threw their children overboard”, isn’t it. Utter bullshit. These so-called leaders have made Australia, and Australians, worse.

How did I not know about Bullet Journaling? Thank goodness for Donica. A few years ago, I would have been right on this, but thankfully I know myself well enough to not get sucked into this kind of organizational fetish these days. (For what it’s worth, I use TaskPaper to keep a running to-do list by day; whatever I don’t complete today, I defer to tomorrow. Easy.)

I’m suddenly very reliant on everytimezone.com — handy, and lovely. The best kind of thing.

Barack Obama’s summer playlists have dropped. How excellent that Courtney Barnett is on there!