This article prompted me to remember that I had a neglected blog: Blogging is Healthy: It’s no longer the white-hot center of controversy it was in 2005; now it’s part of the establishment, and if you look at the numbers from the popular platform providers like WordPress and Blogger, still growing quite nicely thank you. Freshness Matters: When you don’t update a blog, it gets stale fast. The natural tendency of the human mind to favor what’s fresh is reinforced by search engines leaning the same way. ...

Alan Kohler: …in Australia, the budget is in a wonderful position – heading back into surplus in a couple of years despite one of the world’s biggest and most successful stimulus programmes during the global recession. But you wouldn’t know it. Five billion dollars needed in flood recovery spending and … oh dear, we need a levy. Can’t possibly wait a year or two to go back into surplus. What would Tony Abbott say? ...

2010! I remember as a kid thinking 2000 was far away, and then a little older thinking by 2010 I would have this, or that, or the other thing over there. 10 years seems like a stupendously long time when it is as long as you’ve lived, or more than half your age. If you asked me what I’d actually done in a whole 12 months, I think about the only thing I could say without qualification was that I changed jobs. It really has disappeared in a blink - I started off the year thinking I was on the verge of buying a house. I had a decent paying job, I had a loan pre-approved, and I was hunting houses. I even went to an auction or two, and even put my hand up for bidding… and was promptly blown away, my budget puny in the face of the realities of the house market. ...

How Stuxnet inflitrated and frustrated Iran’s nuclear program: At Natanz, for almost 17 months, Stuxnet quietly worked its way into the system and targeted a specific component – the frequency converters made by the German equipment manufacturer Siemens that regulated the speed of the spinning centrifuges used to create nuclear fuel. The worm then took control of the speed at which the centrifuges spun, making them turn so fast in a quick burst that they would be damaged but not destroyed. And at the same time, the worm masked that change in speed from being discovered at the centrifuges’ control panel. ...

It’s November 2010. Motherf—- No, time to ease up on the swearing, and admit that this year got out of hand. Hell, these last 18 months have just been a bit of a rollercoaster ride, ever since that fateful day when I was dunked in the cold shock of finding a job you love is not forever, even if you’re doing the best you can. That as far as I can tell was the last time I was blogging with any regularity, and after that, I had to force myself to blog, to try to justify having this site. I remember looking at this site just earlier this year and noting the only reason my archive list hadn’t faltered in getting links for each month in 2010 was because I hit one post a month, sometimes only by the skin of the month’s last day. And yet here I was with 4 drafts in various states of polish or indeed finish. ...