Pretzel Logic

The most isolated capital city in the world is not a bad place to sit out a global pandemic. As of April11, Western Australia has recorded just 506 confirmed COVID-19 cases, the vast majority of which are overseas travellers or cruise ship passengers.  At this stage at least, community transmission is very low and should continue to remain so under the social distancing provisions that have been applied. The Labor state government is doing an excellent job in preventing the spread of the virus, locking down the state border and prohibiting all but essential intrastate travel. So the odds are that we in Western Australia could have this Coronavirus fully beaten – as in eliminated – well before any other state in Australia, let alone the other countries of the world. But what happens then? How do we maintain our virus-free, hermetically-sealed corner of the world while we wait for the vaccine to be developed so the rest of the world can catch up? Sadly, our international ...

For a company that knows more about cultivating fanatical advocates than perhaps any other, Apple has really come a cropper this week. Their really clever software engineers have been busy with a ground-up re-write of one of their 'halo brand' products - Final Cut Pro. Final Cut has a huge following of semi-pro and professional video editors.  It was among the leaders in bringing broadcast quality video editing to the desktop - and away from high end Silicon Graphics workstations running software that cost tens - or hundreds - of thousands of dollars. Apple could conceivably have continued developing Final Cut Pro incrementally, but there were big gains in speed and usability to be gained by re-writing the software as a 64 bit application.  Ability to access more RAM and handle many processing tasks in the background (allowing the user to keep editing while the application was rendering, for example) were key drivers in the decision. With a more or less blank sheet of ...

I don't recall the last time I had a sick day. Working from home means you've got to be really, really crook (like stay in bed all day crook) to not be able to haul yourself into the office at least for a bit of the day. But surgeon's orders, and the myriad horror stories I read and heard about post-operative misery made my mind up to take it real easy and to resist the magnetic pull of the office. Sure I still checked my emails (but didn't respond to any!) but otherwise it was a truly work-free day. The best part? I didn't feel guilty. Instead I spent most of the afternoon talking on the phone to my mother and sister who live in Sydney. Not the usual sort of brief, distracted chats we usually have when I'm on my way to a meeting or in the middle of some task with the timer on, but an engaged and broad ranging conversation. For a change I didn't feel guilty when hanging up too soon. And I finally found the time to start a blog. I expect I'll cut shor...