Australian Open 2020

It’s January, which means it’s time for our annual Australian Open selfie :)

Selfie of a man and a woman, both wearing sunglasses and straw hats.

This year’s Australian Open was fun. We didn’t wander around too much, but we got excellent seats at Court 3 and stayed there for most of the day. (The joys of getting there early and getting lucky with the day’s schedule of play so that most of the matches you want to watch are all being played on one court.)

A woman crouches low in front of the net on a tennis court while her partner - behind her, at the other end of the court - serves the ball.

One of the doubles matches we got to watch on this court included top-ranked Australian player Ash Barty. The queues to get in just before that match were the longest we’ve seen in a while.

Long queues outside Court 3 at the Australian Open in Melbourne.

Fortunately we’d arrived early enough to watch the match from a nice, shady spot :)

World #1 Ash Barty waits to receive a server from her opponent.

Also, we were sitting just below one of the Hawk-Eye cameras that tracks the ball during play. I only learned today that this ball tracking technology is accurate up to 3.6mm!

A camera mounted to a pole around a tennis court.

Love Letters To Feminisms

Nadia and I had an excellent time this afternoon at ‘Love Letters to Feminisms: a live performance of feminist texts’. Organised by the Loving Feminist Literature collective, the event featured several writers, poets, academics, and performers who shared their works and the works of other feminists.

The performances were powerful and emotional, and each one resonated strongly with everyone in the room.

Nadia was one of the performers and she read a piece that honoured the Pakistan women’s movement and all they’ve achieved over the last few decades.

Nadia performing at ‘Love Letters of Feminisms’, alongside an Auslan interpreter

Bonus: the event was held at the Bluestone Church Arts Space in Footscray, which a lovely venue that looks great in selfies :)

Selfie in front of the Bluestone Church Arts Space on Hyde Street in Footscray.

Seriously, though, it was a joy to be among so many diverse and enthusiastic feminists in Melbourne. I look forward to attending more of Loving Feminist Literature’s events in the future.

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's Chinese New Year concert

One of the highlights of this week was watching the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s (MSO) annual Chinese New Year concert.

This year’s East Meets West show was all about “symphony meets rock ‘n roll” and it featured the MSO and Beijing-based Mongolian rock band Hanggai.

If you haven’t heard Hanggai before, here’s one of their songs they performed (accompanied by the MSO).

Support Lisa-Skye's MICF Safety House Guide!

I love live comedy, particularly stand-up comedy. So one of the coolest things about living in Melbourne is the annual Melbourne International Comedy Festival (MICF).

However, for various reasons, Nadia and I don’t attend too many MICF shows. The ones we do attend, then, we’re very picky about.

Basically: we don’t want to watch performances by bigots, racists, misogynists, assholes, and so on. You’d think that in 2019 you’d be hard pressed to find people who make those kinds of jokes on stage. But, of course, you’d be wrong.

One of the best ways to avoid attending a show at MICF that’ll make you feel uncomfortable or unsafe is by checking Lisa-Sky’s Safety House Guide.

Here’s what she has to say about this on her Safety House Guide 2019 Pozible page:

In 2017, I noticed a theme among people who came to my shows - they'd tell me they loved seeing my shows every year at festivals, but didn't want to 'risk' going to other shows, for fear of being the punchline of jokes. They weren't just scared of hearing tired old material bashing who they are (fat jokes, sexworker jokes, racist jokes...) but a few of them were hesitant about audience participation, even when the artist had the best intentions.

And I thought, stuff that - everyone should feel safe to enjoy seeing live performance. 

My favourite thing is showing cool stuff to cool people, and promoting good work from performers with an ethos based in kindness and diversity. So at last year's Melbourne International Comedy Festival, I created the first Safety House Guide. 

Lisa-Skye’s Safety House Guide for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival

Lisa-Skye’s Safety House Guide for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival

Nadia and I have already bought tickets for a few MICF shows this year (including Judith Lucy and Hannah Gadsby - yay!) but we’re not going to get any more without consulting that guide first.

If you’re someone who’ll want to use this guide – or even if you’re not, but your recognise how valuable a resource it might be to others – please consider providing financial support to it via Pozible. Nadia and I have already pledged to do so. Lisa-Skye is going to produce this guide regardless, so let’s help her our as much as we can.

Making International Women's Day events in Australia more diverse

If you work in corporate Australia you’ll know all about the various events (usually panel discussions) that businesses tend to host or participate in around International Women’s Day (IWD).

As Cathy Ngo writes, most of these events aren’t particularly “diverse”.

But the problem I see with many IWD events, is that they look a little familiar. The venues may get fancier to attract corporate sponsors, but the line-ups are too often far from diverse. You tend to see the same career narrative presented: often from white middle class women, with backgrounds in journalism or TV.

I’m in no way downplaying the achievements of the speakers and panellists – but it doesn’t exactly reflect society’s broader career-pool and life experiences. An event where we are meant to celebrate all women’s progress and achievements, can quickly become a celebration of white, able-bodied, heterosexual, middle-class women’s experiences.

This, of course, shouldn’t be the only experience we consider when it comes to gender equality.

Observing gender-equality through a solo lens, only allows us to see one angle. It excludes a huge percentage of women who have a completely different lived-experience but whose stories are equally valid and critical to a more nuanced conversation. As a society and in the workplace, we must ensure our gender inclusion policies and practices are made with those who can give voice to the lived experiences of all women.

If you want your event to have more diverse representation, multiple points of view, and a discussion of different lived experiences, check out this article that Ngo wrote for Women’s Agenda (which is where that quote above is from): ‘Speakers, organisers & attendees: Here’s how to make IWD events more diverse’.

I’m on the working group that’s organising this year’s IWD events at Transurban. We know from experience and surveys that IWD events aren’t particularly interesting or useful to attendees if they can’t relate to the people who are speaking or presenting. So we’re actually using some of the ideas from that article to make our speaker line-up as diverse as possible. I’m looking forward to seeing what we come up with! 

<random aside>

Also, is it just me or does the #BalanceforBetter pose look like a smiley-er version of the shrug emoji?

Compare the official photo/social media pose for this year’s IWD theme:

To the shrug emoji:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

</random aside>

Instagram wrap-up: January 2019

Here’s what I shared on Instagram in January 2019. (ICYMI, starting this year I’ll be cross-posting everything I post to Instagram to this blog.)

Maggie

We had a super hot start to 2019. Maggie, being a very Australian dog, loves the heat.

It's going to be 42 degrees today.

[@nadianiaz, hanging up the laundry] It's *thoroughly* unpleasant outside.

[Maggie, an Australian cattle dog] It's perfect.

When the weather is nice, though, we all like to hang out in the garden.

Afternoon nap in the garden with Maggie. (Yes, yesterday it was 42 degrees here. Today it's a top of 19. That's Melbourne for you. That's also why I love this city.)

Maggie loves her rope toy.

Maggie recommends a slow and steady deconstruction of your rope toy. "Take your time and pull that thing apart thread by thread," she says.

Events

January saw the start of #SlowSummer on SBS.

All set for a #SlowSummer with the Indian Pacific on SBS :) #SlowTV #sundaynight

Nadia and I went to the Australia Open tennis tournament, where every year we take a selfie.

Annual Australian Open selfie with Nadia :)

Melbourne went through three-ish heat waves in January. The last series of hot days ended with rain showers across the city. I work on the 29th floor of a building in the Docklands that has great views.

Gap in the clouds at sunset from Docklands, Melbourne.

Selfie

I finally got around to buying a quality Panama hat. Which, of course, meant that I had to take a selfie while wearing it :)

Yay, quality Panama hat! Been wanting one for years. Literal h/t to Gentleman's Gazette for the purchase inspiration and City Hatters Melbourne and Avenel Hats for the actual hat :)

The NBN is 62% faster in our new house!

This time last year we finally got connected to Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN).

Doing so dramatically increased our average download speed from 6.9MBps with ADSL2+ (over the old telephone copper wire network) to 46.7MBps with NBN (over a new NBN fibre optic connection to the closest telephone/internet exchange).

A little over a week ago we moved into an independent house in another suburb. This meant we were no longer sharing that fibre optic internet connection with the other residents in an apartment block.

I checked to see if this had increased our connection speed and, sure enough, our download speeds have gone up by 62% to 75.7MBps!

Woohoo! 

Pro tip: If you’re looking to move house and, like me, can’t live without the NBN, check out the nbnm8 Chrome extension. When you use realstate.com.au and Domain to search for properties it’ll automatically do the nbn availability look-up for you :)

We're finally connected to the NBN!

On 23 June 2014 I tweeted this:

But it wasn't till yesterday, 15 December 2015, that we finally got connected to Australia's National Broadband Network (NBN).

Yes, this took 1 year, 5 months and 22 days. 

What was particularly irritating was that our neighbours got connected several month ago. It took us this long because we're in an apartment building. Which meant that, first, our Body Corporate had to get their act together and network our building — which they finally did at the end of October.

We then had to wait till iiNet, our prefered ISP (who we've been with for over six years), released their Fibre to the Basement plans for selling NBN services to individual apartment building residents. 

Once all these pieces fell into place, though, things moved quickly. And, six days after the NBN became available to us, we were online:

We're now enjoying download speeds seven times faster than our old ADSL2+ connection (an average of 46.7Mbps with NBN versus 6.9MBps with ADSL2+) and upload speeds thirty-one times faster (27.6Mbps now vs 0.9Mbps previously). We're also connecting faster, with an average ping time of just 2.5ms with NBN vs 27ms with ADSL2+. 

It's awesome.

Of course these speeds aren't as fast as the NBN can theoretically reach ("up to 100Mbps") or as fast as my internet connection is at work (average downloads at 64.3Mbps and average uploads at 86.9Mbps) — but it still pretty darned good. And it's more than enough for any video streaming we want want to do.

So, yay! The NBN was a long time coming, but it was sure worth the wait.

Picking an AFL Team to Support

I've been in Melbourne for almost eight years now and it's about time I picked an AFL team to support.

How Do You Pick a Team?

There's lots of advice on the web about how to pick a team: 

There's also this infographic from Reddit (from December 2012) which is both useful and funny:

Plus this thread for the 2014 season:

Brand Associations

All that is good advice but I think there's a quicker and easier way for someone like me to choose a team: using the power of brands and brand association.

So here's what I did:

  • I went to each team's website and looked at the list of their partner brands - both sponsor brands who support the team financially and support brands who provides the team with goods and services
  • For every brand that I liked (i.e. for which I'd be a 'promoter' on the NPS scale) I gave that team a +1 score
  • For every brand that I didn't like (i.e. for which I'd be a 'detractor' on the NPS scale) I gave that team a -1 score
  • I ignored the brands I didn't have strong feelings for or wasn't familiar with (i.e. for which I'd be a 'passive' on the NPS scale)
  • I then added each team's +1s and -1s and gave them an overall score - a 'net positive brand association score' of sorts

This is the result (sorted by highest-to-lowest score, then alphabetically by team name):

So, if I was to choose a team by brand association alone, then the team I'd be supporting is the Sydney Swans, with the Brisbane Lions coming in second. 

(I've kept my scoring here really simple, by the way. Had I wanted to do a more sophisticated analysis I could have first given 'principle', 'major', and 'premier' partner brands higher positive and negative scores and 'associate' and 'support' partners lower positive and negative scores. Of course this would have given undue importance to brands that simply had more marketing money to spend. So next I would have looked at each brand's annual revenue and marketing spend as a proportion of annual revenue and tried to undo some of those effects. And I might have introduced a 'sponsorship proportion' multiplier for each brand. That is, if a club had twenty partners instead of ten, each of those twenty brands would have had half as much proportional weight. There are many more things I could have done but I'm not feeling particularly nerdy this weekend. I'd rather watch TV or browse Reddit.) 

The brand I like the most from that list, by the way, is iiNet, which is a Hawthorn partner. But the brand like the least is Swisse, which is also a Hawthorn partner. So those two pretty much cancelled each other out. Oh well. 

So, there you have it. After living in Melbourne for almost eight years I now tentatively support the Sydney Swans. Go figure. 

Next Steps

Now that I've reached a tentative result, I need to research the Swans and watch some of their games. If I'm going to support them seriously I need to know much more about them. I need to learn about their players, their coaches, their history, and so on. 

A quick skim through their website has been positive: 

  • They're all over social media and even have their own mobile app - though I suppose this is pretty standard for sports teams in this day and age
  • There's nothing untoward about them in the news - at least nothing I could find when I searched for 'Sydney Swans controversy' on Google News
  • They have two clubs for their female supporters - one in Sydney called L@SS and one in Victoria called LOL (both names I like)
  • They have a Black Swans Supporter Group
  • They have a blog series called 'Swan Songs' in which they talk to past great players called 
  • They have player blogs, one of which was actually updated in 2014

I'll now keep an eye on them and report back if all is going well and if I'm going to continue to support this team.

Till then, go swannies!

Save the Ferris

Wearing my 'Save Ferris' t-shirt

“Save the Ferris” he says, enunciating each word carefully, trying to sound less tipsy than he actually is. He belatedly ends his statement with a rising intonation, making it a question. He gestures helpfully at my t-shirt.

I'm tired and I like my happy-drunk people to have greater pop culture awareness. But we've only just crossed the eleventh floor and the lift isn't very fast (new hotel, old building) so I can’t pretend I haven’t heard him.

“It’s from a movie,” I say. “From the 80s. Called Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.”

He looks confused. “Oh really?”

“It was quite popular in the 80s,” I add.

“Yeah man,” his friend chimes in, “haven’t you seen Ferris Boomer’s Day Off?”

I smile helpfully in their general direction.

He thinks for a minute but, just as he says “No,” the doors open and two more people walk in. We descend in silence for a while, but the newcomers are getting off at the mezzanine, so soon it’s just the three of us again.

“Save the Ferris,” he repeats. Once again adding the “the” that isn't actually printed on my t-shirt. He says it more thoughtfully this time – his brain cells working hard but still drawing a blank.

“You should watch it I say,” as we the doors open at the lobby, “it’s a fun movie.”

That’s apparently an excellent suggestion because he beams at me and says “I’ll do that,” and since this is goodbye, “Have a great night!”

“You too!” I respond enthusiastically. Then I buy a fruit cup and head back up to my room to finish the presentation I'm working on.

Just another night at the Gold Coast.

Mapping My Social Networks: Facebook, LinkedIn

Following on from my post on Immersion, the Gmail metadata mapping tool, I learnt of two other tools that map Facebook and LinkedIn metadata (i.e. your social graph). David Glance mentioned them in his article in the Conversation about the power of metadata ('Your social networks and the secret story of metadata').  

This is what my Facebook social graph looks like:  

What's cool about this network mapping is that, because people share a lot of information about themselves on Facebook and the tool knows who my friends-of-friends are, you can see one level deeper and find sub-networks within my broader social graph. Many of these are high school and university based sub-networks but some are also immediate-family groupings. 

The social graph that's probably cooler (and certainly prettier) is this one from LinkedIn Maps: 

This shows you that I'm connected to four major networks, one each for my two universities (LUMS and MBS) and one each for the two places I've worked at the longest here in Melbourne (Melbourne Water and Jetstar). 

And even though Jetstar and Melbourne Water are in completely different industries the kind of work I did (and am still doing) in both jobs is similar so the crossover space between their two clouds is where all my suppliers, vendors, and industry contacts are. 

One thing I've noted while doing all this mapping is the size of my network on each platform:  

  • Gmail contacts: 478 
  • LinkedIn connections: 505 
  • Facebook friends: 505 
  • Twitter followers: 776 

That's reasonably consistent and certainly above average for each of those social networks. I suppose that's a good thing. 

 

Immersion: Mapping My Email Networks

I've spent the last few days playing around with Immersion, a fabulous email network mapping project from MIT's Media Lab.  The project's creators describe this as "a people centric view of your email life" and what the tool basically does is create a network map of all your Gmail emails using the From, To, Cc, and Timestamp fields. 

Who Have I Been Emailing? 

You can can learn a lot from these maps. For example, here is what my email network looks like from April 2004 to July 2013. (I do actually have email from 1999 onwards in my Gmail account but, for whatever reason, Immersion only mapped my email from 2004 onwards. )

 

The person I emailed the most during this period was Nadia. After that, the network of people I emailed the most was my family. Obviously Nadia is also heavily connected via email to my family network. She is also connected with our Melbourne friends network and, to a smaller extent, my MBS (MBA) and LUMS (BSc) classmate networks.

The two other networks of people I emailed the most were my work colleagues at MBS and my other freelance jobs. 

Digging a Little Deeper

That's a high-level view but you can also divide this 2004 to 2013 date range into three distinct periods in my life.

The first is from 2004 to 2006, which is when I was living in Islamabad just before I came to Melbourne to do my MBA:  

Nadia and my family are obviously the largest nodes and network of nodes here, too. Aside from that, my LUMS classmates, my music projects (Corduroy and the F-10 1/2 project), and my other projects (earthquake relief) all have identifiable email networks of their own.

A couple on specific nodes are also interesting. Mosharraf, one of my seniors from LUMS and also a work colleague, is a connector of networks. And, on the upper right hand side, you can see my email correspondence with MBS starting to play a bigger role. 

The next period, from 2006 to 2008, is while I was doing my MBA at MBS: 

Here my MBS classmates network is a huge part of my emailing. That network also overlaps with the MBS staff network - from my emails to and from the Careers Centre team and my work colleagues from when I worked at MBS for a few months before graduating.  

Emails to my LUMS classmates have dropped of quite a bit, though I was still emailing Amanullah quite regularly. 

Finally, here is what my network looked like after I completed my MBA, that is from 2008 onwards:

Now a new network has popped up: my Melbourne friends outside of MBS. And, thanks to Facebook, I don't email my LUMS or MBS classmates as much as I used to.

That's really cool, isn't it? :) 

Summary Stats

Immersion also gives you a summary of your email stats, including who your top 'collaborators' are (and, if you want, you can also drill down further into your connections with each of these collaborators).

These are my overall stats and the stats for my two top collaborators: 

Yes, that's 20,879 emails with 194 collaborators over 9.3 years :)

My most active email sending years were 2007-2008, which was when I was doing my MBA. My most active email receiving years were 2010-2012 and I think those were because of Nadia, my family, my Melbourne friends, and various mailing lists. 

The group of people I email has stabilized over the last few years so the number of new collaborators I've been adding has dropped considerably. That's also because my Melbourne Water and Jetstar work emails aren't in Gmail so they're not counted here. 

Finally, the two people I collaborate most with are Nadia and my older sister Asha. I like that I've sent Nadia over a thousand emails, of which about two-thirds were sent just to her. Meanwhile I've sent Asha only 515 emails. Of those 137 were sent just to her, which makes sense because she's part of that big family network. 

So there you have it - my life in email.  

If you use Gmail you should check Immersion out yourself. It's fun to use and you can learn a lot about yourself and your email networks in the process.