Welcome to Muse & Reason, I’m Dr Robert N. Winter and this is my public Memex. A place for articles, essays and jottings.
A trained historian and philosopher, I apply these disciplines to organisational and information technology research, informing my leadership of teams at the nexus of strategic management and program delivery. At present, I am enabling Standards Australia to achieve their organisational goals through a series of business transformation projects.
I have fifteen years’ experience managing concurrent project streams, with responsibility for operational and strategic excellence. My focus is on driving organisational efficiency, transparency, and effectiveness – delivering successful program management solutions across Publishing Operations, Customer Success, International Engagement, eCommerce, Sales, and Marketing. I have a strong record of taking over troubled programs / projects, developing new delivery plans, and leading teams to the successful attainment of organisational goals.
Recommended Reading
Fiction
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Any of the Sherlock Holmes Stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, though the novels The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four are masterful
- The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes is a highly recommended edition for anyone wanting to know more about the historical setting of the stories
J. R. R. Tolkien
P. G. Wodehouse
Oscar Wilde
Stephen Fry
Non-Fiction
Niall Ferguson
Andrew Roberts
Steven Pinker
Yuval Noah Harari
Daniel Kahneman
Tom Holland
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Hannah Arendt
Michael Burleigh
How I Do Computing
Environment
My desktop computer is a hefty AMD RYZEN Threadripper, Corsair Cooling, Nvidia GPU and plenty of RAM. When mobile, my machine of choice is an M2 chip MacBook Air.
My OS preference is Linux and current distro flavour is Fedora. I use Obsidian as my focused writing and note taking environment as It pairs wonderfully with Zotero for research projects.
Privacy
Perhaps it is a creeping presbyopia, in which life seemed to afford a greater privacy in the past. Perhaps it is an increasing awareness of the intrusive nature of advertising and data mining. Whatever the cause, I have become a strong privacy advocate and try, difficult though it is at times, to Restore Privacy. But with Privacy Guides it can be done.
Firefox for browsing
- Tor gets an honorable mention
Brave for Search
- DuckDuckGo and Startpage get honorable mentions
Signal for messaging
ProtonMail for email
- Infomaniak Email gets an honourable mention for those who don’t need E2EE
ProtonVPN for VPN
Proton Drive for file storage
- kDrive gets an honourable mention for those who don’t need E2EE
- NextCloud also gets an honourable mention for those willing to manage their own service
Mastodon for social posting
- While I understand the pull of the world’s biggest social network, Stop Using Facebook has some compelling arguments if you haven’t seen them…
PixelFed for social imaging
WordPress for blogging
- Write.as gets an honorable mention
For those looking for a Google Docs / Office.com replacement and don’t want to manage a NextCloud instance: Infomaniak’s kSuite and CryptPad offer a great suite of tools.
Hosting
Hosting is provided by Infomaniak. They are a Swiss jurisdiction, privacy respecting, green hosting provider.
A Sovereign, Open and Healthy Web
This section is inspired by Ru Singh philosophy of an ‘Open and Healthy Web,’ Aral Balkan’s conceptualisation of the ‘Small Web,’ and the burgeoning IndieWeb project. The prime principles of which are:
Your content is yours
When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.
You are better connected
Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Even replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.
You are in control
You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you. In addition, you share simple readable links such as example.com/ideas. These links are permanent and will always work.
This represents a reform of the global digital network to promote the adoption of individually-owned and controlled sovereign spaces.