Blogger meetup

Back when I was fit, I used to do sprint triathlons (the shortest possible). Every now and again, I’d feel fit enough that I would cautiously describe myself as a “triathlete”. I’d usually find that I was talking to someone who had just finished the Hawaii Ironman.
In a similar vein, I was catching up with [...]

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Book Review: The Long Tail

Today’s book review is The Long Tail: why the future of business is selling less of more, by Chris Anderson. Originally a Wired magazine article, then workshopped as a blog, it got the biggest response of any Wired magazine, so Anderson decided to develop it as a book.
I had been looking forward to reading it. I [...]

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Five things

This is via Charlotte – a list of things about myself other bloggers might not know. The idea is to develop a repository of people who may be subject matter experts in certain areas, not necessarily professional ones, so that other writers will have a wealth of research material to dip into …
But I’m just doing [...]

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Like a mediaeval court

A controversial biography of Alan Jones is about to be published, and has been excerpted in the weekend papers. The blogosphere seems pretty focused on the relevations (which aren’t really relevations to anyone who has paid any attention to Jones over the years) about his likely (?) alleged (?) homosexuality.
But the thing that really struck [...]

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More sporting history

Philippe Rizzo has just won Australia’s first ever world gymnastics gold medal. Apart from celebrating the success of Australians in genuine worldwide sports (I think gymnastics counts, even though you have to be quite well-off to do it, so you don’t exactly get many African countries), I have to record this for personal reasons.
Gymnastics was [...]

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Sharing

When Chatterboy was born, we insisted on buying everything new, despite offers of useful stuff from quite a few people. Nothing but the best for our boy! we thought. Luckily, our friends were more sensible, and many of Chatterboy’s pieces of equipment have been used by many of them. The bassinet, in particular, has become a [...]

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Book Review: Why TV is Good for Kids

Today’s book review is Why TV is Good for Kids: Raising 21st century children, by Catharine Lumby & Duncan Fine (who incidentally are married to each other with two small children). Despite the title, its not just about TV. Its a series of chapters (in some cases rants) about all the different ways in which [...]

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How to promote women?

In AFR Boss magazine last week, there was an article about the federal Australian public service (sorry, it’s not on the website), and how it seems to have reached critical mass in terms of senior women – so much so that they have their own word – femocrats.  One third of the eighteen most senior [...]

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Idle Rich

I watched Gosford Park on DVD last night. As I think Robert Altman intended, the effect of showing both upstairs and downstairs, and making the people matter, is astonishment at the amount of work that went into maintaining that between-the-wars relaxed country house lifestyle that so many great books used as a setting (Dorothy L [...]

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Childhood longitudinal study

I’m watching a documentary about 1 year olds on the ABC, which was inspired by this study of Australian children. It’s the first part of a study that’s going to be happening every two years.
It’s funny, every time I see a study like this, I’m itching to get my hands on the underlying data. There is [...]

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