Flowers!

I wasn’t feeling well last week so Nadia bought me a big bunch of flowers when she went down to the shops.

Cheered me right up too!

Selfie of a man – bald, bespectacled, with a salt-and-pepper beard, and smiling at the camera – standing on a deck outside a house holding up a large bunch of bright yellow daisies in front of his face.

Making your own mayo

One of the joys of owning an electric hand mixer is that it’s quick and easy to make your own mayonnaise :)

Selfie of a man looking into the camera holding a glass bowl filled to the top with pale yellow coloured mayonnaise. The man is bald, with a salt and pepper beard, and is wearing glasses and a dark grey hoodie. He is standing in a residential kitchen.

Clingy dog is clingy

When your dog is being extra clingy after a trip to the vet, this is how much space she gives you to put on your shoes ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Photo taken from head height of a seated man looking down at his fee. The man’s sneakers are lying close to one side of his feet and only one foot has a sock on it. There is almost no space on the carpeted floor for the man to put his socks and shoes on because a red dog has come and sat down almost directly in front of him.

Maggie often hangs out with the person who didn’t take her for a walk that morning. This morning not only had Nadia taken her out, but she’d taken her out to the vet on her own too.

14 year blogging anniversary

It has been fourteen years since I wrote my first ‘technical’ blog post.

I say technical because I was posting occasional life updates on my personal website before then, but this was the first time I installed blogging software on my site and posted something through there.

An email from Fantastico alerting me that an instance of WordPress has been installed on my website.

Blogs are the best because you’re the boss

Blogs – and personal websites in general – really are the best.

Social networks, micro-blogs, and photo/video hosting sites are fine and all. But on all of those you’re at the mercy of the platform. The folks who run that platform (or the AI that moderates it) can delete your profile and your entire content history if they want to. And you can’t take all your content and migrate it to some other platform either. You’re always stuck inside their walled garden and they control what it is that you can and can’t do there.

On your blog (or website) your content is always yours. You can do whatever you want with it. You do have to manage the site itself, but these days even a minimally skilled user of the internet won’t find that particularly challenging. And, sure, more functional and nicer looking blogs will cost a little, but running a basic, decent looking site isn’t as expensive as you’d think.

Blogs aren’t what they used to be though

Of course the content of my blog has changed drastically since 24 April 2007. Back then I talked a lot more about random things going on in my life (hence the name ‘random tangent’), the things I liked and didn’t like, the movies I’d watched and music I’d listened to, and what my current interests were.

Most of those topics don’t warrant full blog posts anymore. A couple of photos and 2-3 tweets usually do the trick for me. Often just a simple retweet or quote tweet is pretty much all I want to say on a topic I’m not actively involved in. Also, with a retweet I can share other people’s point of view, not just my own.

What goes on my blog these days are the things I want to remember, process, and revisit in the future. Things I don’t want disappearing into the social media black hole that are then difficult to find later on. Things that, for one reason or another, matter.

So here we are, and here’s to another fourteen years.

Waiting for take-away dinner

Turns out this is my ‘really looking forward to a chicken teriyaki bento box’ face.

Selfie of a man with glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard. The man is wearing a dark grey cap and a light grey zip-up sweatshirt. He is smiling at the camera that’s a little below his eyeline. He is indoors, but the background is blurry so you can’t make out where he is.

One year of working from home

Friday, 13 March 2020 was my team’s last day of working from the office – though I did go in the 16th for a couple of meetings in the morning. Hard to believe that was exactly one year ago today!

Guess that’s life when you live in interesting times. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Photo of text written on a whiteboard that says: “Looking for the Digital and Social Media team? We’re all working from home for the forseeable future. Contact us via Webex, phone, or email.” This is followed by two hashtags that say ‘flatter the curve’ and ‘COVID-19’.

To quote Vladimir Ilyich Lenin:

There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.

February and March 2020 was definitely a set of those weeks!

G-Shock life

Not your typical double-wrist watch shot, but a double-watch wrist shot!

That’s what you do when your wife hands you her G-Shock while she powerlifts her personal best weights :)

Photo of a man's wrist on which there are two black Casio G-Shock watches, one larger and one smaller. In the background of the photo is a barbell with weights on it.

Nadia at BBB lifting party 11

Today was awesome! I got to watch Nadia lift her personal best powerlifting weights at the Barbell Babes Brigade lifting party :)

Photo of a woman wearing a brightly coloured singlet beams at the camera while holding her hands up towards the photographer to show her palms coated in white chalk. Behind her is a weight lifting rack with a weighted barbell across it.

Photo of a woman in shorts, a singlet, and socks with her hair tied back in a ponytail. The woman is leaning forward and gripping a barbell with heavy weights on it. Her expression is serious and her muscles are tight because she is about to start deadlifting this barbell. In the background is a weight lifting rack bolted into the floor and hooks bolted onto the wall with assorted weight on them. You can deduce from her environment that she's in a gym.

Photo of a woman in shorts, a singlet, and socks with her hair tied back in a ponytail. The woman is standing up, having successfully lifted a heavily weighted barbell. Her expression is one of joy and bewilderment as if she can't believe she just successfully lifted that much weight. She is looking at another woman, also in gym attire, who is clapping and cheering as she walks towards the powerlifter as if to give her a celebratory hug.

This is BBB’s eleventh lifting party and the third I’ve attended. It’s such a joy and rush to watch so many fantastic powerlifters achieve so much and have that much fun while doing it!

Also, happy fourth birthday to Barbell Babes Brigade!

Photo of about four dozen women in powerlifting gear gather for a group photo in a warehouse gym with the worlds 'Barbell Babes Brigade' painted on the wall behind them. The women and smiling, cheering, and shouting. There is a balloon in the shape of the number four behind them.

Perfect timing

Perfect timing with the delivery! I’m heding into the long weekend in Melbourne with the latest Seanan McGuide book :) #WinningAtLife

(Not that it'll take me the whole weekend to read it, of course.)

Photo of a man holding up a paperback book titles ‘Calculated Risks’ by New York Times bestselling author Seanan McGuire. In the background of the photo is a red dog, sitting on the grass, looking up at the photographer.

Favourite 4K videos

Hello. Here are some of my favourite 4K videos, timelapses and hyperlapses (ie moving timelapse).

First we have JeffHK’s ‘30 Days Timelapse at Sea’.

I’d been wanting to buy a 4K monitor for a while. That video of Jeff’s is what finally got me to pull the trigger on a 32” 4K Dell display. Thanks Jeff!

Jeff’s more recent '14 Days Timelapse of U.S. East Coast' is fantastic too.

And while you’re on his channel, check out his Panama and Suez canal transit videos.

Next is Mike Oblinski whose storm videos are mindbogglingly gorgeous. Like his recent ‘Monsoon 6’.

Or 'Vorticity 3’ from a few months ago:

Then we have Timelab Pro, who create some of the most fantastic 4K+ drone footage.

Their latest video is from Switzerland.

Though my recent favourite of theirs is ‘75 000 h.p. The Biggest Nuclear Icebreaker’ – which is set to Hans Zimmer’s Inception soundtrack, no less.

Next we have this lovely hyperlapse from FilmSpektakel which presents 'A Taste of Los Angeles’.

Finally there’s this timelapse that I just recently came across. It’s from The Timewriters and is a riveting ‘Travel from Rotterdam to Amsterdam in 10 minutes by boat'.

If watching these types of videos is totally your jam, by the way, search for ‘4K timelapse’ on YouTube. You’ll find so many fantastic videos.

Happy watching! And let me know if you have any favourites I should really watch.

Yay for quality NATO straps

I really love the Blueberry Broad Weave NATO strap that I got from Bark & Jack.

Its extra structure helps keep my heavier watches in place on my wrist. Like this BOLD Expedition Everest that I’d stopped wearing as much because none of my other NATO straps could handle its heft.

Dangling watches begone!

Photo of a man’s wrist with a hefty, brushed stainless steel field watch strapped to it. The watch has a vibrant blue dial colour with bright white numerals, markers, and hands. Near the top of the seconds hand is a pale orange rectangle that is easy to track as it rotates around the dial. The watch case has two crowns sticking out of it on the right side. The watch is on a strap made out of woven material constructed from thick blue and black threads.

The strap’s blue and black weave also elevates its quality, versatility, and looks. I can wear it with practically all my watches and it pairs nicely with most of my outfits.

Close-up (macro) photo of a watch strap on a man’s wrist (you can see the man’s black and white arm hair to the right of the strap). The strap is made out of nylon fabric and has a broad weave pattern of thick black and blue threads.

And, while we’re taking macros photos, here’s one of the dial as well.

Close-up (macro) photo of a watch dial. The watch case is brushed stainless steel, meaning it’s not very shiny. The dial itself is a vibrant medium blue colour. The numbers; hour- and minute-markers; and numerals printed on the watch are all a bright white colour. Above every hour marker, though, there is a small pale orange square. The watch’s hour and minute hands are chunky and slightly tapered towards the end. These are black at the base and white at the tip. The watch’s second hand is thin. It is black at the base and pale orange at the top. Two-thirds of the way up the seconds hand, where the orange colour starts, is a rectangle filled with luminous material. The brand name printed on the watch is BOLDR.

Gaming PC FTW!

It’s here! Exactly five months and one day after I ordered it, my Scorptec Blackout Gaming PC is finally up and running – and it’s all that I’d hoped it would be :)

Photo of a wide desk showing a large black desktop computer tower with a Wi-Fi antenna on top of it. Next to the tower is an ultra-widescreen computer monitor. The monitor is switched on and has a cloudy, starry nebula displayed on it. Behind the monitor is a pair of desktop speakers. In front of a monitor is a split gaming keyboard and a gaming mouse lying on a mouse pad.

Upgrading my PC gaming, er, game

I’m a PC gamer and over the last few years I’ve been buying myself Gigabyte gaming laptops. But when Microsoft Flight Simulator came out last year and struggled to run on my AERO 15 laptop – which, to be fair, is now three years old – I realised it was finally time to upgrade to a full-on gaming desktop. This decision coincided really nicely with NVIDIA releasing their GeForce 30 series, their latest line of dedicated graphics cards.

So, on the day the RTX 3080 was released (which was 18 Sep 2020 in Australia), I ordered a pre-built gaming PC from Scorptec, my favourite local computer retailer.

(Much as I’d love the idea of assembling my own gaming PC, that’s not something that I want to spend time on. I have several other mini-projects to keep me occupied.)

A graphics card? In this pandemic?

Sadly the COVID-19 pandemic threw a wrench in NVIDIA’s production schedule. While, on the customer side, demand for those graphics cards far outstripped whatever NVIDIA could supply. So, from the middle of September 2020 to the middle of January 2021, my computer desk remained unoccupied.

Photo of a wide, half empty desk with several computer accessories arrayed on it: a pair of desktop speakers along the back; a gaming joystick and throttle; a gaming steering wheel; and three boxes, one each for a keyboard, mouse, and mousepad.

By November 2020 Scorptec had realised just how low the supply of the new NVIDIA graphics cards was going to be, so they created a page on their website though which customers could stay updated on how things were going. My NVIDIA graphics card was ASUS customised and co-branded. When Scorptec’s page was originally launched they’d only managed to fulfil 13% of the pre-orders on that particular card.

By January 2021 those pre-ordered had climbed into the 20% range. That’s when the curved, ultra-widescreen LG computer monitor (38GN950-B) that I’d ordered in December 2020 arrived. (Yay!)

Then, in mid-February – when that number climbed to 38% – I got a message from Scorptec to say that my gaming PC was almost ready to go. (I’d asked for an extra hard disk to be installed and that delayed the order by a couple of additional days.)

So it was on 19 February 2021 that I finally got my hands on this gorgeous machine. Now I can finally play Flight Simulator to my heart’s content. (After its 157GB data download, of course.)

Photo of a desk on which there are: a computer tower, an ultra-widescreen computer monitor, a split keyboard (with backlit keys), a gaming mouse (which a glowing logo), desktop speakers, a gaming joystick, and gaming aircraft throttle, and a large drinking mug. The computer screen shows a window with a long download progress bar.

Throttles and pedals and wheels, oh my!

Funnily enough, Flight Simulator is the game I’ve played least since I got this PC.

Instead of joystick and throttle mode, I’ve gone mostly into steering wheel and pedals mode. (Thrustmaster FTW, either way.)

Photo of a desk on which there are: a computer tower, an ultra-widescreen computer monitor, a split keyboard (with backlit keys), a gaming mouse (which a glowing logo), desktop speakers, and a gaming steering wheel. Below the desk is a set of gaming car foot pedals. Pushed to the sides are a gaming joystick, a gaming aircraft throttle, and a paper stand on which there is a printed diagram of that joystick and what its various keys are mapped to.

The games I’ve been playing most are SnowRunner, BeamNG.drive, DiRT Rally 2.0, and Never Alone – all of which are fantastic and I’d highly recommend. (That last one, of course, is narrative based side-scroller that only requires a keyboard and mouse.)

I’m also really looking forward to Forza Horizon 4 which will finally be released for PC on 10 March.

So here’s to many more hours of gaming enjoyment. If you’re a gamer of any sort too, I wish you many hours on joy on your gaming set-up as well. #GameOn

2021 annual Australian Open selfie

Given the year we’ve all had, our annual Australian Open (tennis) selfie is a little different this time.

Our round 3 tickets got cancelled because of the snap five-day lockdown in Melbourne, so we just went to the women's singles final instead :)

Selfie of a man and woman, both wearing face masks. They have their backs to the Rod Laver Arena tennis court, which is about half full of spectators. On the tennis court itself is Naomi Osaka, winner of the 2021 Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup – which is awarded to the winner of the women’s singles tournament. Osaka is holding that cup and is getting her photo taken by a large group of photographers gathered at one end of the court.

Rod Laver Arena is such a gorgeous venue to watch matches in. And even at 50% capacity we managed to make plenty of noise.

Wide angle photo of Rod Laver Arena, a tennis arena with a rich blue playing surface. The seats, which are also in shades of blue, are about half full with spectators. The sun is setting behind the photographer so there is a golden glow on the seats on the far side of the arena.

Speaking of venue capacity, it was super strange seeing Grand Slam Oval so empty! But with only two matches tonight, and the whole place strictly divided into zones anyway, it makes sense.

Selfie of a man and a woman, both wearing masks, with a mostly empty food and retail sports tournament space behind them. In the background is a building a smaller tennis arena.

Give this was a finals match we got to watch a short musical pre-show, complete with bisexual lighting.

Photo of a large tennis arena with its roof closed. The arena is bathed in blue and purple lighting while a trio of singers perform from one end of the court.

As for the match itself, well here’s Naomi Osaka’s serve in slow motion.

Of course at any modern sports venue the Spidercam is da real MVP.

Photo of a Spidercam camera mounted on a 360-degree gimball that’s attached to the ceiling by wires. This lets the camera zip around above the heads of the players, capturing the action from lots of different angles.

And even though we didn’t need these this year, Nadia is still a big fan!

Photo of a woman hugging a large metal fan that’s mounted on a wide cylindrical pedestal. Combined, the pedestal and fan are 50% taller than she is. On hot days these fans spray a fine spray of cold water over people passing by.

Remembering my mother on Pakistan National Women's Day

My mother, Shahla Zia, would’ve turned 74 today. (#FuckCancer)

In the time that she was alive, Ami played a significant role in women’s movement in Pakistan (one example: she was a founding member of AGHS, the first all-female law firm in Pakistan).

My younger sister, Maliha Zia Lari, is a lawyer who followed in my mother’s footsteps. And in this (bilingual) interview Maliha talks about my mother’s life, impact, and legacy. If you’re someone who knew my mother, this is worth a watch.

Favourite podcast sign-offs

Do you have a favourite podcast sign-off ? I have six!

This Week in Tech

Up first is the O.G. podcast sign-off from Leo Laporte (with an occasional assist from Owen JJ Stone) on This Week in Tech:

LEO: “Another TWiT…is in the can.”

Rocket

Then there's my favourite podcast sign-off, which is from Simone de Rochefort, Brianna Wu, and Christina Warren on Rocket:

SIMONE: “This episode of Rocket is terminated.”

BRIANNA: “Terminated.”

CHRISTINA: “Terminated.”

Darknet Diaries

Next is the most consistently entertaining podcast sign-off, which is from Jack Rhysider on Darknet Diaries:

JACK: “And even though <insert funny, nonsensical, episode-specific tech reference/joke>, this is Darknet Diaries.”

Command Line Heroes

Possibly the most encouraging podcast sign-off is from Saron Yitbarek on Command Line Heroes:

SARON: “I’m Saron Yitbarek. Thanks for listening and keep on codin’“

Full Story

This next podcast sign-off is the most unassuming, but somehow also the most reassuring. It's from Laura Murphy-Oates from when she's the host of Guardian Australia’s Full Story:

LAURA: “Okay, catch you tomorrow” or “Okay, catch you on Monday.”

99% Invisible

Finally there's the podcast sign-off that always makes me happy. This is from Roman Mars on 99% Invisible and ends with:

ROMAN: “…but in it's heart will always be in beautiful downtown Oakland, California.”

17 years

17 years of having our weirds in alignment.

A man with glasses and and a salt and pepper beard in three-quarter profile looks quizzically at the middle distance. A woman with long dark hair sits behind him making a silly face at the camera. (Selfie by Nadia Niaz.)

Happy anniversary Nadia!

Selfie of a woman and man with exaggerated expressions of surprise and wonderment on their faces.

New dog bed is a winner

Maggie adores the new dog bed that Nadia got her! It’s basically a big, comfy shag carpet for dogs.

A red dog lies comfortably on a large, extremely fuzzy round dog bed.

My favourite is when she buries her face in its fuzzy walls while napping during the day.

A dog has its face buried well into the wall of a large, extremely fuzzy dog bed. The dog’s ears are still pricked, however, and those are raised slightly above the height of the bed’s wall.

Her radar ears are always alert to changes in the environment, of course.

A dog that had its face buried in the wall of a large, extremely fuzzy dog bed has now lifted her head out and is looking at something offscreen.

She can even comfortably keep an eye on the rest of the house while floating lazily on the fuzz.

A dog is lying across the full length of a fuzzy dog bed that has soft, high walls (which themselves are soft and fuzzy). The dog is resting its head on top of the wall so it can keep its eye on what’s happening in its surroundings.

Fuzzy bed FTW!

A dog is lying across the full length of a fuzzy dog bed that has soft, high walls (which themselves are soft and fuzzy). The dog is resting its head on top of the wall so it can keep its eye on what’s happening in its surroundings. This photo is taken from low on the ground so the dog, without lifting its head, is looking straight at the camera.