Birthday boy

AJR is a teenager, it is scary but true!!

He celebrated the actual day at Wombeyan Caves, near Goulburn on a year 7 school camp. He did not enjoy camp at all. They were in teams of four and sleeping in tents, which they had chosen as a team over cabins. Each member of the team had to contribute to the cooking, one person had to bring pots and pans and cutlery and crockery. In AJR's team, the guy bringing the pots and pans ended up being too sick to come, so they had to join another group for meals. The teachers cooked a meal on the second night for everyone, apart from that they cooked for themselves. From my point of view the whole camp was badly managed.

Lots of cooking happened on Friday night and Saturday, before the mob from Wentworth Falls arrived at 3pm on Saturday afternoon to celebrate AJR's birthday. In the evening Auntie J and Uncle P arrived for dinner.

Then on Sunday we were joined by G'ma and G'pa.

And we all had lunch together.

Bill Bailey

On Saturday 13 September four of us went to see Tinselworm - Bill Bailey's one man show. JR and I met K and T at Dylan Moran's show a year ago - I remember seeing them in the distance at interval. We caught up with them to discover that we were all Black Books fans. In May this year, T rang me at 6pm one night to tell me that Bill was touring and how with a special code I could get advance tickets - after much discussion and hilarity, I managed to book us tickets, which I kept secret from JR until a couple of weeks before the show.

We went to an Indian restaurant in town for dinner before the show, and then walked back to the Royal Theatre for a drink before the show started.

Bill is a classically trained musician and was able to combine comedy with a range of music and musical instuments all of which he played well.

I have not belly laughed so much in a long time. If you get an opportunity to see him then, grab it with both hands.

Mondo

Velib's

When next in Paris be sure to check out the Velibs (not just the girl)

Photograph courtesy of A Photographer in Paris

Article on Velibs

Wall-e and Friend

Just to the left there is another person hiding behind the manga

Coffee anyone?

Here is the cup of coffee I had at Freedom Home in Woden on Sunday. It was slow in coming and not nearly as good at the coffee I had at APK also in Woden earlier in the day.

Another Saturday in Sydney

Last Saturday saw the family Rutherford in Sydney - in two different places.

We travelled together towards Sydney from Heathcote at about 9am to Erskinville an inner south suburb and the girls were dropped at the railway station. There is a coffee culture around the rail station and shops and it all looked very cosmopolitan. Meanwhile the boys - aided and abetted by their GPS - travelled on to the old train repair sheds at Enfield to the Australian Technology Centre. A two day Animania Festival (manga) convention was being held, and AJR was determined to see everything he could in one day. We could not attend on Sunday as JSR had an important engagement with his clubs at 1.00pm on Sunday.

Mushroom Heartless

(left to right:)
Toshiro Hitsugaya and Soi Fon, Alphonse Elric, Sesshoumaru and Inuyasha
Photographs by AJR

The girls went to Powerhouse Museum for a little culture. We had a talk on the Strasburg clock, which was built by Bartholomew Smith. The clock is based on on a model in Strasburg, France. Smith built it based on a postcard of the original. One part of the clock gives the times for each of the state capitals, I was surprised to find that Brisbane was 10 minutes ahead of Sydney, which was 10 minutes ahead of Melbourne!!!

Around lunchtime the girls met up with Unce R and Aunty T, plus girl child and boy child and had a lovely yum cha in China town followed by an exploration of Paddy's markets. Once our legs got tired enough we moved upstairs for a coffee. The boys picked the girls up about 4pm as they had seen enough at the Convention. As the GPS seemed to be blocked by all the tall buildings (a condition of most cities) we drove over to Bondi Junction on blind faith, a wish and luck. Once at Bondi Junction we checked out the Westfield shopping centre. Most shops did not close before 6pm, which we appreciated.



After Bondi Junction we drove to Sutherland and had a happy birthday dinner for G'ma with G'pa at a Thai restaurant.

All in all it was a lovely day.

Unusual Fruit

While in Belconen the other day visiting my friend KR for lunch, I noticed a tree in her carpark with unusual fruit.

Bro assures me that it is a take on an episode of "My name is Earl", where similar fruit appear on the ariel of the building after successful conquests of the fairer sex - I tried to find this episode, however I failed!!!!

The tree

and on a lighter note you can see that spring is sprung (buds - the alternate fruit)

Indigenous Literacy Day

Ok guys, mark your calendars for the 3 September and make sure you buy a book at one of the participating bookstores to support the work of the Fred Hollows foundation and the Booksellers of Australia.

10% of each book purchased goes to provide books and information to isolated Indigenous communities across Australia.

For more info, see below.
Indigenous Literacy Day

Terrible Tuesday

Well it is official, I think Tuesdays are the worst day of the week.





Yesterday it went like this:

• Drop off ironing early - good


• Breakfast out with friends - good


• In to work after 9am - bad


• Off to speech therapy at 12.30 - drive to Kambah, then Holder, back to Kambah and back to work at 2.30pm - total kilometers = 58 - bad


• Work is hectic - bad


• Leave work just before 5pm - drive to Monash pick up dog and kids and then drive to Forrest to visit dog sitter, back to Monash drop off kids and dog, out of the drive to collect ironing - an additional 41.4 kilometers -


• Home for the evening at 7pm


• Tea (cooked by JSR) at 8pm

This is how I felt all day!

photo by Li Gao for more of these go here

An alternative to death by powerpoint...

For a fast paced approach to information exchange, you might want to try this approach at your next presentation

Pecha Kucha

Japanese for "chatter"

And the winner is...

Yes I asked a question the other day - where am I having coffee and I thought I should supply the regular readers with the answer which is "in a mug". Ok also having coffee at the Coffee Club. Please note that I would never be seen in a Starbucks, as I have issues with Starbucks.

Thank you to all those who gave an answer - next time I see you, I owe you a coffee.

Mondo.

Wordle

I did threaten some of you with the arrival of my first wordle and here it is

This is a wordle of my blog. If you want to try it out, then go to this site

Wordle



Enjoy,

Mondo

Walking and wine

The Sole Sistaz (you remember us) went out along the Federal Highway to Lerida Estate Winery. Well actually three Sistaz and an honourary Sista arrived at the rendezvous at 11.30 am last Saturday. The day was overcast and threatening rain and snow. The reason we drove an hour out of town to do this walk is that it is part of the Fireside Festival. This festival includes things like walks, listening to jazz or other music and lots of food and wine in different venues all over the region. The festival runs for the whole of August. We walked from Lerida Estate to Lake George Winery (next door). We had to cross a creek bed or two, open and close gates and walk through a pine forest. The walk took a slow hour. We retired to the Cafe at Lerida estate for an elegant repaste, before driving back home to hide inside for the rest of the weekend. The top temperature for Sunday was 7!

Learnings

Overview of the last two weeks of learning - focussed on Knowledge Management/Information Management/Open Source Software


Articles/slide shares

User Centred Design for Web 2.0 and Beyond

Cory Banks – Knowledge Manager PB discusses the KM issues at PB
My first six months

James Robertson – Step Two Design - Collaboration is about people (not the one he gave at the conference, but I like it better as it is more people focussed). When the one from the conference is available I will add it to this document.

James Robertson writes 2-3 whitepapers a month on KM – these can be found at
Step Two

Karen Huffman – National Geographic – What’s all the buzz about social networking applications?

A discussion on web 3.0

BTnet – this will give you free access to many journal articles – I just found one on the difference between IM and KM.

Michael Sampson – we’re catching up

Michael Sampson – 7 pillars – I thought this was a good simple approach to working with distributed teams. This can be used to assess whether a product is going to do what you need it to do.

Max Weakly – gave a paper at Open publish 08 which I did not attend, when I can find it on slide share I will post it here – Web designer for the Australian Museum. Max also gave us the following quote “every tag is sacred” with apologies to Monty Python

Matt Moore – The truth about enterprise 2.0

Cool and useful sites to look at

Slideshare
Here you can share your slides, or get inspiration from others slides.

Step Two Design

Mindmeister – an online mid mapping tool
a place many people can collaborate at the same time

Shared Spaces – Michael Sampson’s site – has interesting articles that would be worth RSSing.

Icerocket
searches blogs, web, myspace, news, images

Summise
aggregates twitter tweets

Friendster
a social network site like Myspace or Facebook

Eric Schmidt - Founder of Google
responsible for making AJAX popular

Twine : Twine is a new service that helps you organize, share and discover information about your interests, with networks of like-minded people. You can use Twine alone, with friends, groups and communities, or even in your company.

Cool Tools
AJAX
first coined in 1998, made popular in 2005 by Google.

An fun explanation of code design by a rapper on Youtube (for all the techies)
Art is immortal


Useful things that I learnt

1. If you want to collaborate or effect change then your group needs to feel at least one of the following things before they will collaborate effectively or make the cultural or corporate change that you are looking for.
R = Responsible
A = Accountable
C = Consulted
I = Informed

2. Wiki’s will move into virtual intranets
3. Move to 720 degree feedback particularly for web producers (blogs, intra/inter net, online publishers etc) – that is 360 degree feedback from your work colleagues and 360 degree feedback from your online clients
4. QR coding (also known as Telstra Codes)
A company embeds a code in a poster on the wall and you point your mobile phone at it, you connect to the internet and you can then purchase what is being advertised on the poster – tickets, clothes whatever.
Here is a demo from Youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDop0sqOR2E&feature=email
5. Within 5 years the majority of web usage world wide will be mobile – my interpretation of something Matt Moore talked of.
6. Information placed on the web will need to be device agnostic

Cool and Useful Blogs to watch

Technorati
This is a good place to start looking at what blogs are out there as it covers multitudes of blogs and enables the viewer to see what is happing in blog world.

Steve Rubel’s twitter site

Steve Rubel’s combined site – combines blog, twiter, flikr and friendfeed

Matt Moore - Engineers without fears blog. If you get a chance to hear this chap speak take it – he is excellent.

Beware there is more, only my brain hurts now...must lie down...arghhhh

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 - this is why my head is so full - I am trying to get all this stuff inside it!

From: satyajeet_02, 1 year ago

Web 2.0

View SlideShare presentation (tags: satyajeet singh web2.0 web)

what you need to become web 2.0


SlideShare Link

Sydney

I was in Sydney for an Open publish conference at the end of July. Apart from lots of time learning new things (my brain is definitely bursting at the moment) I did take some time out to do other things:



This is the view from the 63rd floor of a colleagues hotel room - the window is floor to ceiling and the window is on a part of the room that juts out from the rest of the room, which makes it look like you are able to fall off!

One evening I walked down George Street and caught the town hall in all its evening finery.

a little further on down George Street I found a familiar sight, kids corner at Kinokunia

and yes somehow a couple of Japanese books dolls leapt into my bag to come home with me

during the day I walked around World Square.

An interesting time was had on this little adventure.

Someone is hungry!

Tuesday bloody Tuesday

FAIRFAX NEWS LIMITEDTUESDAY, 12 AUGUST 2008

After running a thousand errands, working hours of overtime, and beingstuck in seemingly endless gridlock traffic commuting to and from theirjobs, millions of Australians were disheartened to learn that it was, infact, only Tuesday.

"Tuesday?" Canberra resident Doris Wagner said. "How in the hell is itstill Tuesday?"Tuesday's arrival stunned a nation still recovering from the nightmarishslog that was Monday, leaving some to wonder if the week was ever goingto end, and others to ask what was taking Saturday so damn long."Ugh," said Wagner, echoing a national sense of frustration over it noteven being Wednesday at the very least.

According to suddenly depressed sources, the feeling that this week mayin fact last forever was further compounded by the thought of all thework left to be done tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and, if Australians make it that far, possibly even Friday, for goodness sake. Fears that the week could actually be going backwards were alsoexpressed. "Not only do Australians have most of Tuesday morning to contend with,but all of Tuesday afternoon and then Tuesday night, " National LaborRelations Board spokesman David Prynn said. "If our calculations are correct, there is a chance we are in effect closer to last weekend than the one coming up."Added Prynn: "F**k."Reports that this all has to be some kind of sick joke could not beconfirmed as of press time.

Isolated attempts to make the day go faster, such as glancing at watchesor clocks every other minute, compulsively checking e-mail, hiding in the office bathroom, fidgeting, or reading a boring magazine while sitting in the waiting room, have also proven unsuccessful, sources report.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology, which oversees the official time of Australia, is flatly denying that it has slowed orotherwise tampered with Tuesday's progression. "The current Tuesday is keeping apace with past Tuesdays with no more than one ten-thousandth of a second's variation at the most, " NISTspokeswoman Dr. Geraldine Schach said. "However, I sympathise with the common consensus that this week has already been a colossal pain in the neck."Labor Secretary Elaine Chao released a statement addressing wide spread speculation that it might as well be Monday for all anyone cares."We understand this day has been tough on many of you, what with meetings mercilessly dragging on and an entire stack of files still left to organise," Chao's statement read in part. "Yet we urge Australians to show patience. The midweek hump is just around the corner, and we have strong reason to believe that Saturday will be here before you know it.""Go about your lives as best you can," the statement continued. "Do not, we repeat, do not take a sick day, as it'll make the rest of the week that much harder to endure."In the meantime, citizens are doing their best to cope with the interminable week, though Tuesday is still hours away from ending.

"The more I try to speed it along, the longer it almost seems to take,"said Dale Bouchard, a Sydney-based broker who has been waiting for today to be over since it first began earlier this morning. "Honestly, today could not have come at a worse time this week."In the meantime, the latest wristwatch consultations indicate that it issomehow still Tuesday, if that makes any sense at all.

Please note this is a pretend article that someone emailed me and I thought it described my Tuesdays (yes all of them) really well.
Mondo.

Guess where I am having coffee?

Any chance of sponsorship?

August 6 celebrates

today is:

• Mum's birthday - have a great day!!!



Photo courtesy of TC

• Parramatta Park celebrates 150 year anniversary in 2008
• 20th anniversary of the death of Andy Warhol - here is a short interview from 1974
• 63 years since the bombing of Hiroshima
• 1965 Beatles release "Help" album in UK

Cheers,

Mondo