Over the Christmas / New Year break, Tech Talk panelists are taking time away from the studio.

During this time, we’re running a “best of” series which showcases highlights from the last few years.

So far, we’ve heard from:

Georgia Simmons, representing the Telstra Foundation;

Graham Henley from GetData;

Michael Crimean, a professional audio engineer;

Adam Turner attending the launch of the HTC Magic in Sydney, as well as the launch of Apple’s iPad and the opening of Apple’s Bondi store in Sydney;

George Pongas, the COO of ISP Domain Central;

Dr James Chon, representing Swinburne University;

Alan Eade from St John Ambulance (Victoria);

Mark Mayer, retired QANTAS airline pilot;

Jeff Alexander and David Glover from Microsoft;

Closet Tech Geek Sally Cockburn (aka “Dr Feelgood“);

Sandrina Branton from BMC Software;

European Correspondent Matthew Robinson;

Gaming expert Leena van Deventer;

Luke Durham from Switch Media, and Adrian Britton from HostWorks;

Independent technology journalist Anthony Caruana;

…as well as select Panel discussions, websites, gadgets and Odd Spots, and entertaining and informative Views from the Couch.

Next week we’ll re-visit the last episode of 2010, and Tech Talk’s inaugural Outside Broadcast, which went to-air live from the Sofia Family Restaurant in December.

We’ll all be back live in the studio on the 14th of February.  Rumours that former Tech Talk panelist Mark Diggins is back in the country are largely founded… stay tuned!

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Woooaah … truckloads.

There are 1001 blog-worthy things to blog in my blog about.

Sadly, time (lusty and blithe) is at his apogee.

In brief, I have:

• Had a shave, since the last blog post;
• Upgraded The Surgery WordPress blog from 2.8.3 to 2.9;
• Moved WordPress blog from Fedora 9 machine with crappy dynamic IP address (it was killing me) to shiny Fedora 11 machine with static IP address;
• Marveled at my ability to upgrade WordPress, SQL databases and move them across Linux machines, AND make grown-up changes to DNS zone files – am surely a guru of such things now and legend in my own lunchbox;
• Undertaken 2 of 8 Tech Talk Radio Summer Series productions, time-consuming but rewarding;
• Upgraded the HTC Dream / Google phone to the next Android operating system, very successful;
• Teetered on the brink of e-mail bankruptcy;
• Ordered a new PC for Christmas;
• Ventured inside an Apple Store for the very first time, and escaped by making only a minor purchase (a new iPod Touch); and
• Just today, assisted Mrs Dr Ron in restoring her iTunes library, after she deleted all the music files from her PC’s hard disk  - successfully achieved restoration by using a third-party app called iRip which we’ve spoken about on Tech Talk in the past (thanks JD, saviour of Dr Ron’s marriage).

I have also Tweeted mercilessly about our well-intentioned (yet incompetent, foolish and mis-informed) Senator for Communications and the Digital Economy, Stephen Conroy.  In case you hadn’t caught up with the news (which the good Senator saved until after the last live episode of Tech Talk for 2009), Australia will be ranked highly with the United Arab Emirates, Iran and China in its foolish deployment of an ISP-based Net Filter.

Adam Turner has had a lot to say about this, and made a clever analogy with a different type of infrastructure.  His blog posts here and here in The Age last week should be mandatory reading.

I’ll blog in more detail about these and other things soon.

I hope you have a great Chrissy and a safe and prosperous New Year.

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