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A very short list of things I liked about being pregnant

It was all over four years ago yesterday, and here’s what I remember fondly:

A week and a half of not testing, and just walking around being pretty sure that everything was changing.

Seeing a beating heart on the ultrasound during a threatened miscarriage, and walking home feeling so proud of the tiny little thing in there, beating its heart like that.

The first time I felt a baby move inside me; the sensation of rolling over and something rolling the other way, like a bolt had come loose inside me and fallen away.

Rubbing a baby spine through my belly.

Listening to the heartbeat storm up on the monitor as the baby prepared to kick at the sensors squeezing my belly.

Labouring at home in the light of the many blue LEDs I didn’t realise we had until that night.

People politely waiting around a hospital room for contractions to pass every 3 minutes or so, so we could resume our conversation.

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2017 in threes

End of year reflections.

Reading over last year’s (very dark) reflections, I would say 2017 was not the year I feared. While it will take a few years yet to tell what 2017 really was to the world, for me, it was a quiet and quite inward looking year, after a very hard 2015 and 2016.

Three moments of 2017

January: I was ill and taking regular naps at work; weirdly easy to go to sleep. Dark rooms, trip-hop through my headphones, and free associating.

May: New York City, so overwhelmed in a new job and so jetlagged that I worked a fifteen hour day and fell into bed for a brief sleep when I lost the ability to speak English.

November: Snorkelling in the Whitsundays, wishing again and always that I had scuba equipment, but happy and peaceful in the water.

Three meals of 2017

May: our wedding anniversary meal, degustation at Restaurant Como. Especially the rose-and-raspberry Eton mess, adding a bunch of subtlety to something that’s usually more like a hammer for a sweet tooth.

May and November: sashimi at Asuka Sushi. In planning to visit New York a few times a year, I wanted to find a few rituals to get me through the visits. Sashimi seems like a good choice. Protein versus jetlag.

Throughout the second half of the year: the truffle oil dumpling at the Din Tai Fung outlets throughout Sydney. As with making an Eton mess subtle, this makes truffle just subtle enough. And there’s only ever one of them…

Three photos of 2017

This represents being happy at work to me, although it’s also a million years ago in 2017-career-time. I was a newbie facing her first performance review, not the incoming manager of the team):

Today's look: writing self assessment for performance review. ?

By the following cycle, I was doing performance reviews for other people.

A sweet boy and his baby cousin:

Cousin cuddle

The sun setting over the exit from Monk Park in Tamworth, a walk I did many times as a child:

Last rays

Three pleasures of 2017

Throughout the year: bike rides to work after a fresh service and with full tyres, fast climbs for a change.

May: our wedding anniversary weekend away west of the mountains. Wood fire, hot tub, creek nearby, eucalyptus leaves glowing yellow-green when the sun shone through them.

August/September: the week when skiing finally clicked for me. Mid-week, I led Andrew down a narrow run that neither of us had seen before. With my daughter ill on the last day of our lift ticket, Andrew took care of her in the morning while I did my last ski runs; three each of the intermediate runs on Merritts Mountain. Two falls all week; one the now traditional collision with Andrew. Lots of fun.

Three news stories from 2017

January: the first of the Trump travel bans, the one that proposed to limit green card holder travel to the US. Protests at US airports, mobilisation inside my workplace. I ran a fundraiser for a few tens of thousands for refugee rights activism in Australia.

February onwards: Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber and the ongoing work of The Silence Breakers, whether named in Time or not. Australia’s version, I think, is just firing up.

December: the passing of Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Act 2017 on the 7th. I wasn’t in the country when the postal vote results came out and it became clear that fears that the ‘Yes’ vote would be complacent about turning out were unfounded. And I wasn’t following the parliamentary progress either, so I had to catch up that evening. I got a rather mystified Vincent to watch it carefully.

Three sensations from 2017

Throughout the year: hypnagogic hallucinations, almost every night. I’ve occasionally had them before but not nearly so constantly. They’re more like dreams than like free associating for me; they have images and plots. They’re mostly harmless; they’re only somewhat annoying in that I usually wake up from them a few times before going all the way to sleep.

November: New York, around −5°C and windy. Despite my (excellent) new winter coat that I bought for that trip, the cold surrounded my legs in their thin trousers and got up into my core that way. I run very hot, thyroid or no, so getting truly cold on a short walk is very memorable.

November again: sleeping under the stars on a boat in Queensland. I was committed to the outdoor plan as soon as I heard that the cabins often get above 30°C at night. The first night I was short a blanket but really tired, so I woke to squint at the stars over and over before sleepiness won over chill. On the third night, it rained just enough to wake me gently, and not enough to drive me inside.

Three sadnesses of 2017

May: my uncle Rob died of a brain tumour aged 57, just shy of nine months after he was diagnosed (alluded to in last year’s version of this). I wasn’t in the country for his funeral; I flew up to Tamworth the day before I left and drove my teenage cousin around to shop for soft drinks to be served at his wake.

Later in the year: another friend was diagnosed with cancer.

I’ve thought more about Nóirín again this year. It was the year of the silence breakers after all, and of course the Ninth Circuit ruling. Nóirín was one of many silence breakers who paved the way.

Three plans for 2018

We’re heading to Kauaʻi in January with some of my friends, the first time we’ve travelled overseas with both children and both adults. I’m a bit wary of what it will be like, with Vincent the child who is only alive around other children.

I’m going to do an introduction to sailing course early in the year, and if it works out, train through to day skipper so that we can charter sailboats for weekends away. Like camping, only with more water, wind, and creature comforts. That’s the theory.

New York is my main work travel destination, so I’ll be there again at least once. My parents are hoping to join me for one trip. I’d like to spend time in Brooklyn while I’m there.

Three hopes for 2018

Some good news about climate change, whether statistics or serious political will.

Travelling to North America with my family. This is somewhere between a hope and a plan; I’ve barely begun putting it together. But it is increasingly strange and sad having two lives, one as a single career woman in North America and the other as a married mother of two in Sydney. Andrew and I have both walked the High Line in New York, but never together, both explored Lands End in San Francisco, but never together.

An easy one: I hope it rains all day at some point. It’s been a dry year; I really miss a good rainy day.

End of year prompts

I came up with my end of year prompts in 2014, feel free to use them yourself.

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Autumn photography 2017

I switched camera systems in May this year to a mirrorless system, specifically a Fuji XT-20 body with various lenses. Its first big expedition was to New York but soon enough it was time for the much closer to home annual trek around the autumn foliage. The camera body failed around mid-day (had to go in for repairs as it was unable to detect lenses connected to it), very poor timing since Andrew’s niece was born that day, but we had some adventures first.

I remain fascinated by the ludicrous, alien, ornamental pear that is planted in such profusion around here:

Ruin
Leaves against tin roof
Deep red

But eucalypts can hold their own:

Gum nuts
Gum flowers
This year’s full autumn album.

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Book review: The Wife Drought

My quest to be a paid book reviewer remains stalled for two reasons: first, I’ve never once asked anyone for money to do a book review, and second, this book review comes to you express, hot out of the oven, fresh from the year two thousand and fourteen.

Annabel Crabb’s The Wife Drought: Why women need wives, and men need lives is titled and marketed on the old “women need wives” joke, ie, an adult in their home to make meals and soothe fevers and type manuscripts for free.

Crabb is also a well-known Australian political journalist — the ABC’s chief online political writer — who is best-known for hosting a cooking with politicians TV show, and probably next best known for her comic writing style, eg:

Right then. The parliamentary consideration of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act has concluded. The nation has experienced the special thrill of watching its elected representatives fight like ferrets in a bag over a legislative clause even John Howard couldn’t get excited about, and can now dully register the fact that all this fuss has produced exactly zero changes to the clause in question.

Annabel Crabb, There is nothing free about Mark Latham’s speech, April 1 2017.

One or the other of the title’s reliance on the hackneyed complaint about women needing wives, or Crabb’s journalist persona, caused a lot of people I know to write off this book unread. The marketing runs with this too:

Written in Annabel Crabb’s inimitable style, it’s full of candid and funny stories from the author’s work in and around politics and the media, historical nuggets about the role of ‘The Wife’ in Australia, and intriguing research about the attitudes that pulse beneath the surface of egalitarian Australia.
Penguin Books Australia

I suggest you don’t write it off, at least not for those reasons. It’s quite a serious book, and Penguin has buried the lede: intriguing research about the attitudes that pulse beneath the surface of egalitarian Australia. The research is central to the book: Crabb did a lot of one-on-one work with demographers to extract answers to questions that no one had answers to about gender, work, money, and career progressions in Australia. Some of the findings the book contains are in fact new findings prompted by Crabb’s questioning of demographic collaborators (who are acknowledged by name, although not as co-authors).

I found two discussions especially interesting: the way in which Australia makes part-time work fairly readily available to women with young children and the many limits of that as a solution to pay and career progression disparities between men and women; and the evidence suggesting that, contrary to the widespread perception that men are hailed as heroes by men and women alike for participating in the care of their young children, they are actually discriminated against by their workplaces when they do so.

After that Crabb’s writing style is just an added bonus to keep you going through the book. If you’re going to read a demographic exploration of gender and labour in Australia in the 2010s, it’s certainly a nice bonus that it happens to be written by Annabel Crabb of all people. Instead, the major caution I would give is that it’s very middle-class in both point of view and content, without much discussion of that limitation; and is largely focussed on women partnered with men. Assuming that the work lives of middle-class women partnered with men in Australia is of interest to you, recommended.

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Don’t trust Livejournal? Delete your account.

In December 2016, LiveJournal moved their servers to Russia and in April 2017 they updated their terms of use in a way many users find unacceptable.

In January 2017, as people considered the implications of the server move to Russia, I saw a number of people hesitant to delete their accounts as they were hoping to overwrite their data on Livejournal before deleting, by, eg, replacing their entries with Shakespeare’s plays, or with random nonsense, so that Livejournal didn’t have the entry any more. This won’t work and you might as well just delete your Livejournal account.

Here’s a loose analogy for the way that data on a site like Livejournal may be stored:

There’s a journalling website. It stores its entries on vast reams of paper in a giant library and new entries are scribed onto paper and filed.

The “overwrite with nonsense” strategy assumes that any journal entry you make is at a fixed location on a fixed bit of paper for all time. When you update the entry, the scribe goes to the existing bits of paper and writes on top of them. While this is technically possible with hard drives and similar, in a way that it isn’t with literal paper, here’s what more likely actually happens:

You update the entry, replacing it a Shakespearean play. The new version is written on entirely random empty paper (maybe blank, maybe where someone else’s deleted entry once was), and an index in a different part of the library is also updated. It used to say that your entry of January 7 was on floor 6, shelf 216, and now it says that your entry of January 7 was on floor 12, shelf 16.

But the contents of floor 6, shelf 216 are likely not overwritten for some time. Perhaps they’re marked as available to be overwritten, to be reused whenever it seems sensible, but you won’t know when that is. On the other hand, perhaps they are deliberately marked in the index as “an old version of the January 7 entry” for the sake of users having an edit history, or to have an audit trail, or because a lawsuit demands it, or because a government demands it. This may or may not be visible to you.

Even if floor 6, shelf 216 is marked available to be overwritten, it may not be actively erased, and if it isn’t actively erased, it’s available to be searched by a sufficiently determined or empowered person. (And searching unindexed digital storage is a lot faster and cheaper than searching paper, so not one thousandth as determined or empowered as you need to be to search a library full of unindexed paper.)

And even if floor 6, shelf 216 is no longer marked as “an old version of the entry of January 7”, on any moderately well-run website, floor 6, shelf 216 was never the only copy of your entry anyway. What if there was an accident with fire or water or whiteout? There are backups of your entry, probably at least two in the same library and at least one in a different library. These backups are usually moments in time, ie, the state of the entire journalling website as of New Years. The state of the entire journalling website as of New Years the previous year.

These backups are almost certainly never wiped of entries that are simply edited, and without adding a system that searches back through backups and selectively deletes backups of deleted accounts, they most likely contain the complete contents of deleted accounts as well.

So what you’ve ended up with is a situation where floor 12, shelf 16 contains a Shakespearean play, floor 6, shelf 216 likely contains your original entry, and there are several backups around that almost certainly contain your original entry and are designed in such a way as to be found and restored relatively quickly. This is not a much more secure situation than before you replaced the entry with a Shakespearean play; probably not worth the work you did.

All that said, it’s important to know that there are trade-offs in adding secure, permanent deletion. People quite often edit or delete their data accidentally, or temporarily — for example it is quite common to disable social media accounts temporarily to enforce a social media break — and it’s also common to be hacked and have your data deleted by the hacker. Enthusiastic data scubbing will actively harm you in all these cases. On top of that, storage systems fail (in my analogy, the library burns down, except hard drives fail more often than paper does), and backups are especially important then. And any system that goes back in time and edit backups has risks; what if it has a bug (all software has bugs) and deletes things it shouldn’t? System design to balance securely deleting data that users want to permanently delete with rarely or never deleting data they expect to keep is not easy.

So Livejournal or another site has your personal data, what should you do? I suggest that when you no longer use an online service, or you no longer trust in its management, that you take a personal backup of the data if possible and if you want it, and then delete your account.

You cannot usefully take any additional steps like overwriting your account with nonsense to ensure that actual data scrubbing took place and you should assume that it wasn’t scrubbed unless you can find some written guarantee otherwise. However, over time, backups will get selectively pruned, outages will happen, the business may eventually fail and your data will most likely become slowly less available and complete. That’s the best you can do.

For online services you actively use and where you do trust the management enough to keep your account, ask for written descriptions of their data scrubbing practices to be developed for deleted data and deleted accounts, including deletion from backups and handling of disused hard drives.

Elsewhere:

Tim Chevalier, PSA: Switching to Dreamwidth? (January 2017).

Disclosure: I am an employee of Google. This post does not describe Google’s data deletion practices, in which I’m not an expert in any case; it’s a general description of easy, sometimes harmful, defaults that systems designers could fall into. For Google-specific information, you can view privacy.google.com and Google Infrastructure Security Design Overview.

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Don’t trust Livejournal? Delete your account. by Mary Gardiner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.